Sydney Clifton

Coming into this year, I wanted to move beyond the animal forms I had
surrounded myself with both personally and professionally. Despite the
constant production of new models, what I’ve come to believe about
the industry of model animals, such as Breyer, is that commercial
miniature replicas lack connection to animals’ stories. As I grappled
with combining my dual major in anthropology with studio art, I initially
thought the only valid realm of inquiry was to go out into the world to
find stories worth sculpting. But in one of those conversations, I
realized how similar the shared experience of having a pet was. It did
not matter where we were from, because as the sun set through the
windows and my recording had long stopped, we kept going on and
on about the dogs of our lives. In the weeks that followed, I realized
that what I had been looking for was right in front of me all along, and
that I had no business sculpting other animals before I contended with
my own.

In fulfillment of the anthropology component of my
independent study, I conducted interviews with my parents and
siblings to construct an oral history of our dogs’ lives. As snippets of
these conversations play throughout the gallery, I aim to animate in the
eyes of the viewer the essence of my dogs' existences. As I pushed to
personalize elements of commercial production, I began to reimagine
the packaging of the models I grew up accumulating. As these
reimaginings exist in the presentation of each dog, brings to physical
reality my past with Breyer models and the desire to do differently in
my artistic practice.

Sydney Clifton ‘22