Portrait of Danielle Fauth
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Danielle Fauth

About the Artist

Danielle Fauth is a contemporary sculptor currently working in the Towson area on track to receive a BFA in Sculpture from Towson University. Mentored by artists Jon Lundak and Joshua DeMonte, she has developed a proficiency in traditional techniques including wood & metal work. Her most recent body of work is informed by digital fabrication and 3D printing as well as mold-making and casting processes.  Born and raised in Long Island, New York, her initial curiosity in what makes the home, "home," is explored through her recollection of the objects and happenings of her own childhood. Since leaving her native state, Fauth's exposure other communities, environments, and ultimately other narratives, provokes a fascination for anonymous memories. She understands the discarded or abandoned as unclaimed, physical memories. Eroded by the effects of time, their original identities deteriorate, but become easier to imagine.  Through her dreamy, looming creations that provide both real and fabricated fragments of stories, Fauth's work deals with a variety of existential topics that question our own identities, relationships, and beliefs regarding how we got here and what happens after we die - and how  much it matters.  

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Artist's Statement

This body of work explores the human ability to reconstruct memories about place and our personal associations with them. Each piece is a specific object plucked from my mental archive, distorted and abstracted by the interference of my emotions and fragmented recollection. I find that with an iron grip, we tend to attach ourselves to the ideas of objects associated with places of sentimentality as time passes and gaps begin to form in our memory. These dreamy simulations of reality, including growing flowers, open doors, and miscommunications, are attempts to fill in the gaps of stories centered around a place so near to my heart that flickers in my memory. It is an effort to uncover - or recover - a reality with each object functioning as a beacon, or artifactual talisman that until this point has existed only in my mind.

Featured Work

Photos

Mother is a sculpture depicting a domestic object; a sink. Originally this piece was displayed set into a 18” x 38” x ⅜” frosted acrylic sheet. The soap sink was filled with water and left to leak through the bottom where a long stem of hardened soap was attached which haphazardly formed from the canal in the mold. The goal of the installation is to provoke a subtle sorrow and quietness that feels personal and perhaps nostalgic for viewers, leaving them to reflect on their immediate relationships to home and those considered family. For me, this piece is a realization - a cathartic process that helped me better understand my relationship to my Mother. All my life my mother has been private, elusive; our relationship is strained and I often feel like strangers. Mother is an expression of my finally feeling close to her after a break in the stagnancy of our relationship: She had passed me in the bathroom after an argument we’d had, and saw me running my hands under hot water - something I do when stressed. As she quickly passed by, she said “I do that, too.”
Pass Through revolves around my interest in the narratives of abandoned objects. Doors are passageways leading from one place to the next, and without their context are almost void of meaning; of identity. Objects like these often end up on the sides of roads, as trash, or as salvaged materials for reclaim. This installation focuses on my interest in the narratives of abandoned objects. In Pass Through, I attempt to return a sort of dreamy or supernatural vitality to various interior/exterior doors.
Ghost Comms is a meditation on the intercoms within the rooms of my New York home. They have been present as long as I've lived there but were never functional. While I grow, coming and going from home, they sit static and absorb the chaos, loudness, and silence of a one-floor home to seven people. Over the years, they have come to mean more to me about communication and lack thereof. This piece is composed of plaster casts of the original systems I dismantled from the walls of my house. Each mold yielded a different intercom cast, broken and layered with texture in different ways. The repetitive nature and eventual disappearance of most of the intercom face is a reflection of the passage of time.
Dream in Blau is inspired by the first flowers of my life, hydrangeas. They appear every memory of my childhood home, for which my father designed and executed the landscaping. For me personally, these blooms are icons that I strongly with the warmth and sun of summer, the calm of childhood, and that specific shade of blue. As I grow older, hydrangeas in the summer feel more like a dream of the past, and something I long for. To 3D-print these flowers is to bring them back to reality by my own design. Projecting the digital blue to cover them is to paint them in the color of my memory. On the white wall the hydrangeas sit as a quiet moment; a dream in blue.