Premio Combat Prize

€”Traces of Humanity” 2018, 16 silver €miniature repousse sculptures on black velvet:
What started as a study now documents my attempt to form a human face. It was a process of letting go: I tried over and over to “get it right” but always ended up giving in to the will of the metal.
Each began as an empty sphere. Then, as I practiced my technique, a trace of personality appeared. Some were whimsical, some despondent, and some otherworldly. After I had exhausted all attempts to work in this miniature scale, I looked back and saw a collective energy had emerged.
To see them side by side is mesmerizing. It’s an adventure to look from one face to the next; it’s like you’re lost, searching for a familiar face or a familiar civilization.
Artist Statement:
Time melts when I am creating, and I find myself floating from one idea to the next. My hands do the thinking as I channel a time when metal was about power and honor. Perhaps this ancestral gift is a continuation of a lost generation who were doing things for beauty not for material gain. Their work was symbolic, and their signature was deeply imbedded through confident strokes of originality and ingenuity.
BIO:
Keith Plummer, born in 1954 in Damariscotta, currently resides on Oyster Creek in Coastal Maine. He has studied metal smithing with Valentin Yotkov and Micheal Good along with attending numerous workshops at Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. Keith is a self taught sculptor whose experimental evolution has led him to create a body of work that incorporates the precision of metallurgy with an inventive transformation of bone into anthropomorphic form. His concept pieces evoke contemplation about the significance of bones as a narrative of the human condition.
Mr. Plummer has exhibited in numerous galleries throughout the Northeast including Boston and New York City. He has also exhibited in Venice, Italy and Chester, England. His work has been featured in The Woven Tale Press, Exquisite Arts Magazine, Vellum, and The Matador Review. Recently, he received the 2nd Annual Leonardo Da Vinci Award in Florence, Italy.
Judges have noted the following about Keith Plummer’s sculptures:
“These are really interesting because they do show an aged, even ancient influence, but reinvent it as something contemporary; also do not evoke any classical form of art, but cultures that remain mostly unknown and/or misunderstood; these are spiritual, especially because of the presence of the carver’s hand; working in bone always builds tension between the forces of birth and death in the material and the undeniable life inside the artist that manipulates it; (this work is) primal and regal at the same time.”