Martyr

Abstract

Martyr (2017) Wax, paint, glass doll eyes, 90 x 25 x 35 cm This sculpture was produced for exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time, curated by Leigh Robb. The exhibition brought together works by Auguste Rodin in conversation with modern and contemporary artists. Costantino's small figure responds to a work of the same name, Rodin’s bronze The Martyr (1899). Unlike the eroticism of Rodin’s life-sized nude, Costantino’s Martyr lies awkwardly on its side, eyes upturned in an expression of suffering. Wax, the material lost in the bronze casting process, provides the drive of the work. In using this material, marginal to the fine art canon, the artist draws from a long history the in which wax figurative sculpture has operated as the uncanny double of the dead, diseased or absent body.