Sculptor of Everyday Things

Sculpture of buttons and ONLY buttons! White buttons!

Tara Donovan is a sculptor of everyday, easily accessible things. She focuses on only one type of building block at a time: toothpicks, buttons, drinking straws, plastic cups...any collection of identical  "low-profile" items. She turns these physical, ordinary items into organic and other-worldly sculptures. "I am really interested in seeing how individual parts can dissolve into a whole." She cannot explain what draws her to the materials she forms into her works of art. "If I had a very specific answer for this, my life would be a lot easier, because I would always know what it is that I am going to do next...a lot of times, it's just a matter of...essing around with it." She equates her process similar to that of a scientist, experimenting all the time with space, light,  and relationships.
As for being "inspired," a concept she labels 'romanticized,' she explains, "I think it is something you need to work very hard to achieve. It's not something that drops out of the sky."

About a million index cards. 

Here is an interview of the artist and her works.

"Inspiration is a joke. Real artists sit down and work."