Paige Silverman — The Belly of the Wall
2" x 4” pine timber framing, screws, concrete, found tiles, silver plated chain, found shells from Sawney Bean’s cave, aluminum foil from a sandwich wrapper.
120 cm x 60 cm x 240 cm
2021

The Belly of the Wall
2" x 4” pine timber framing, screws, concrete, found tiles, silver plated chain, found shells from Sawney Bean’s cave, aluminum foil from a sandwich wrapper.
120 cm x 60 cm x 240 cm
2021

Paige Silverman

Paige Silverman (she/her b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) is an artist based in Glasgow, Scot-land, working in sculpture, text, and moving image. Silverman received her BFA from Rhode Is-land School of Design in sculpture in 2012, and has attended notable residencies including The Banff Centre Emerging Artists Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Land404. Silverman was recently awarded the RSA Barns-Graham Travel Award 2021 for research in Marseille, France with a subsequent show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2022/23.

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Paige Silverman’s work engages with questions of orientation and structures of power. Using reconstituted objects found in her daily life, Silverman playfully blurs expectations of interior and exterior boundaries. Her sculptures, video, and text straddle the presumptive nature and inherent power of industrial materials, while using hints of narrative and myth to invert expectations of an object’s intention.

Relying on these material tensions to destabilise the viewers experience, Silverman plays with subtle subversions of display. By using museological forms of display or a room’s architecture to direct the viewer’s relationship to a sculpture through a historical lens, she delicately and seductively teases out presumptive relationships to material and myth.

Silverman’s work evokes visceral tactility to create structural moments of decomposition, pulling apart assumed layers of narrative to reassemble and reintegrate, and eventually disorientate.