A few months ago, I needed some panty hose for a potential material for skinning a model I was working on. I walked in to the Dollar Tree feeling a bit foolish, but confident- sort of akin to the feeling one gets when one buys condoms. And I found the last pair of panty hose the place had in stock, buried under tons of merchandise on the bottom of a wrack, and a few hours later had a different idea and never used them.
Panty hose are one of those things that we all know are versatile and probably good for many more applications than just as panty hose- but never act upon. Well not this Dutch artist. Rosa Verloop has created wonderful, mystifying sculptures of the human form from this basic material. The slightly amorphous forms produced by the layering and clumping of the hose combined with ‘wrinkles’ of push-pins, creates a temporal quality to the work. They are clearly not real, nor realism- but you can see the pain and wear of the years in the eyes. They tell a story which is perhaps not tellable through the natural and clearly identifiable.
© Rosa Verloop
