Featured image: "Still" Woman, Yvonne Duck, 2024, mixed media, 45 x 101 in. / 114.3 x 256.54 cm.
Yvonne Duck’s mixed-media sculptures examine vulnerability, bodily autonomy, environmental disturbance, and the unstable boundaries between natural and constructed systems.
Yvonne Duck creates mixed-media sculptures exploring vulnerability, autonomy, ecology, grief, and renewal through organic and constructed materials.
In Wilted, Nest Egg, and Un-Earthed, Duck combines materials including roots, gauze, alabaster resin, glass, wood, and found organic matter to create objects that appear simultaneously architectural and bodily. Her use of remnants, exposed structures, and fragile connections gives physical form to ideas of collapse, care, control, decay, and regeneration. Across these works, the natural world becomes inseparable from questions of human experience, with roots, nests, skeletal remains, and altered structures serving as evidence of systems placed under pressure.
Wilted, Yvonne Duck, 2026, mixed media, 15 x 17 in. / 38.1 x 43.18 cm.
Wilted presents an intimate meditation on collapse through a gathering of elongated, bending forms that resemble plants, bodies, or structures losing their ability to remain upright. Constructed from gauze, thread, alabaster resin, and roots, the installation emphasizes physical fragility through drooping shapes and exposed organic material. Deep reds, muted flesh tones, and pale whites create associations with both botanical decay and bodily vulnerability, while scattered forms along the ground reinforce the sense that something once coherent has begun to fall apart. Duck describes the flag within the work not as a conventional symbol but as a remnant: weathered, uprooted, and suspended within an atmosphere of grief. This distinction shifts attention away from fixed symbolism and toward material deterioration itself. Through sagging forms, torn textures, and exposed roots, Wilted transforms structural failure into a quiet visual language of exhaustion, displacement, and loss.
Nest Egg, Yvonne Duck, 2026, mixed media, 48 x 62 in. / 121.92 x 157.48 cm.
In Nest Egg, Duck brings ideas of protection and vulnerability into direct tension. A green-blue patinated alabaster form resembles both an egg and an anatomical enclosure, establishing the womb as the work’s central spatial metaphor. Thin coat-hanger forms extend across its interior like veins, while a bird’s nest rests within the lower portion of the sculpture. Inside the nest, institutional wired glass and a handmade resin component stamped “US PATENTED” introduce manufactured materials and systems of regulation into an otherwise organic image of shelter and reproduction. The open center makes the interior unusually exposed, complicating the expectation that a womb or nest should function as a protected space. By bringing symbols of care into contact with materials associated with restriction and institutional control, Duck creates a deliberately unsettled relationship between nurture and authority. Nest Egg ultimately presents autonomy as contested territory, asking how spaces associated with protection can also become sites where external systems exert control.
Un-Earthed, Yvonne Duck, 2024, sculpture, 36 x 30 in. / 91.44 x 76.2 cm.
Un-Earthed approaches disturbance through a cross-sectional form that evokes a segment of soil, architecture, or an excavated landscape. Coated in alabaster, the sculptural framework contains charred wood, a fish skeleton, and exposed tree roots, bringing together remnants from different parts of an ecological system. The rectangular structure divides the composition into open zones while roots extend downward through the lower section, making processes normally concealed beneath the surface visible. Charred wood introduces evidence of destruction, while the fish skeleton signals mortality and decomposition. Yet roots simultaneously suggest persistence and the possibility of continued growth. Rather than separating decay from renewal, Duck presents these processes as interconnected. The work’s title reinforces the sense of excavation: what has been hidden within the earth is brought forward as evidence of both damage and continuity. Un-Earthed therefore becomes a study of ecological interdependence in which destruction, decomposition, survival, and regeneration exist within the same material cycle.
Across Wilted, Nest Egg, and Un-Earthed, Yvonne Duck uses material fragility to investigate systems undergoing physical and symbolic strain. Roots become exposed, protective enclosures become contested, structures bend, and remnants of living organisms reveal cycles of damage and transformation. Her combination of organic and manufactured materials repeatedly collapses distinctions between body and landscape, protection and restriction, destruction and renewal. Rather than presenting vulnerability as a single moment of failure, Duck treats it as a condition through which larger systems can be examined. Together, these works create a sculptural language in which what is broken, uprooted, buried, or exposed becomes a means of confronting grief, autonomy, ecological disturbance, and the possibility of regeneration.
Emergence, Yvonne Duck, 2026, mixed media, 66 x 40 in. / 167.64 x 101.6 cm.