Taylor Baldwin

i ain’t afraid of no ghosts

clear acrylic¹, mirrored plexiglas², white acrylic³, brass screws⁴, brad nails⁵, wood⁶, poplar⁷, high-density polyethylene⁸, palisander⁹, drywall screws¹⁰, driftwood¹¹, neon masonry line¹², industrial dye¹³, magic sculpt¹⁴, shellac primer¹⁵, fossil trilobite and stand¹⁶, disassembled police barricades¹⁷, silver paint marker¹⁸, colored and camouflage “duck” tape¹⁹, black light and fixture²⁰, laundry detergent²¹, wooden cutting board²², white limba and mahogany²³, dowels²⁴, colored acrylic²⁵, nails²⁶, mixing stick and polyurethane resin²⁷, pine²⁸, bituminous and anthracite coal²⁹, chain from a 1956 mcculloch 35b³⁰

48in. x 54in. x 54in.
2009

^1.From the Trident dumpster and saved for more than a year despite its surprising weight when stacked together and was eventually very excited when I managed to use almost half of it and was left feeling vindicated in hauling it almost 1200 miles because I initially felt sort of silly about it.
^2.Half of which was given to me for free by the owner of Trident in a surprising act of kindness and goodwill and the other half of which had to be purchased from Altec on a misguided trip to Boston after I realized that I didn’t have enough to finish.
^3.Which was being used as a makeshift dry erase board I salvaged while demolishing the labyrinthine and ramshackle “office” left in Michael’s new studio by the alcoholic contractor Frank who’s name Michael liked to invoke as “The Frank Special” when something looked shoddily made.
^4.Salvaged from the VDOT warehouse liquidation.
^5.Bought from Conwell with great relief because they so rarely have anything I’m looking for.
^6.Of too many types to mention and left over from previous work, the tiniest scraps of which I had been saving for years and so I was super excited when I found out that I could use almost every single piece and not have to bring them with me everywhere anymore.
^7.Borrowed from Julia with her permission under the pretence that I would replace it afterward, but which I have yet to do.
^8.Retrieved after hours from the Trident Plastics dumpster after the good-old-boy owner told me I could hit it up because he “thought I was alright” but not to tell anyone else and also then had to buy a few extra cuts of half inch off of him because they almost never throw out the half inch stuff for some reason.
^9.Traded as part of a package deal with James in exchange for a violin obtained from a Craigslist trade with a sweet music student for drum hardware I had saved from high school.
^10.Admittedly bought from Lowe’s.
^11.Given to me enthusiastically by David for use in a ridiculous but well-paying freelance set-design job for “Shadow Play” which I ultimately did not use in the job and did not give back to him because he kept the halogen lamp from VDOT I let him borrow.
^12.Snagged by Macon for me from out of a dumpster at her miserable job because she thought the color looked like something I could use.
^13.Initially lent to me by Arthur when I first moved into the old studio, but which I kept after I moved out because I got much more use out of it than he would and plus he’s an inveterate packrat and wouldn’t miss it
^14.Bought from the Compleat Sculptor because you just can’t find anything like it anywhere else in the world.
^15.Bought from Lowe’s after seeing how amazing it was when using it to paint one of Michael’s sculptures.
^16.Given to me as a birthday present by my roommate Tim because I had talked ad nauseum about how amazing fossils were that summer and regularly tried to get him to go on a fossil-hunting trip with me, which he rebuffed.
^17.Acquired through illicit means and directed to by Alex while driving around Brooklyn with him and listening to Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet” and feeling slightly giddy about the insignificant act of petty theft but ultimately worried that it actually may have been a felony because it involved municipal property.
^18.Bought at Conwell and applied by a tagger found for me by Sophie, who was a high schooler named Agipato who was reluctantly allowed by the high school bureaucracy to participate but only if I stressed that it was art and not graffiti because he had just been busted for vandalism a few days earlier and they didn’t want me to encourage him.
^19.Shamefully purchased from Wal-mart after hearing that they are the only ones who had developed it in a wide array of colors, even though it’s some generic brand called “duck” tape rather than duct tape, but then told others that I found it instead.
^20.Bought from Marine Supply, which I was surprised to find that they carried it and not the hippy head shop across the street, which apparently only sells headscarves and pornography.
^21.Taken from the Fine Art Work Center laundry room, which I felt okay about because it did not have anyone’s name on it and I used it for my laundry already so I felt there was little difference in taking it again for sculpture, and anyways it might be there for free use.
^22.Bought for me in a small village in Mexico by Calvin and Monica visited from an elderly woman who just cranked them out and tossed them into a huge pile heaped behind her and then they gave one to me as a gift when I visited New York for Pulse and I felt guilty that I was using it in a piece and not for food-preparation so I emailed Calvin to tell him so that everything was above board.
^23.From James’ guitar-making days, traded in part of a larger package deal with him for an as yet undelivered wooden Buddha, tuxedo, or tuba, none of which I seem to be able to find.
^24.Snuck out of Matt’s collection that he salvaged from VDOT because he got there first but I felt like he would have gladly given me if he had been around.
^25.Scraps from almost every piece I’d made in the last three years, the tiniest bits of which I meticulously saved in boxes for years, a habit I knew was not the most spatially-economical idea, and whose use I finally decided to force in order to rid myself of the burden of having to move with them again.
^26.Pulled from the burned floorboards of the arson house, hammered straight, oiled, and saved in a rinsed sour cream container.
^27.The whole of which I had been using for every single white plastic mix for the last year and a half in order to see how large I could get the stalactites to grow from underneath until eventually it became non-functional.
^28.From a disassembled stretcher that Jason was going to throw out, but then thought I could use.
^29.Gathered from where it spilled out the open hoppers cars at the train tracks down by the James after I got the idea from Matt and his coal castle.
^30.Which had been part of a whole chainsaw I ordered from eBay from a strange lady named Tina in Wisconsin whose screen name is dutchgirl777 and restores and sells them and then much later I realized it was the exact same model as the one in Michael’s sculpture that I helped fabricate and I worried that I may have unconsciously been copying him but then also felt that I had been researching the history of logging myself and hoped that I had come to it on my own or had maybe generated an appreciation for it through working on it with him but ultimately felt that I was fooling myself and I had to be more careful of that sort of thing in the future.