Phillip Staffa transforms familiar everyday objects, such as sweets and cigarettes, into oversized sculptures that challenge perception and reveal unexpected beauty. Exploring the tension between seduction, memory and irritation, he uses scale, texture and detail to make the familiar appear strange and provoke strong reactions. His latest work expands into large-scale balloon sculptures, floral forms and new possibilities for outdoor installations, while continuing his practice of giving ordinary objects a new life as art.
Your work will be featured at both Discovery Art Fair and Affordable Art Fair Hamburg. What opportunities do these art fairs offer to present your sculptures to new audiences and engage with different perspectives?
I love art fairs. It seems so simple – but they bring together people who love and live art: artists, galleries, collectors, viewers. I enjoy browsing through the fair halls myself, with more to see than the eye can take in: colours, textures, mediums, and every couple of steps a new small, temple-like booth, each carefully arranged like a pagoda. It nurtures that lifelong feeling of safety and belonging I've always found in being surrounded by art. Having been born near Frankfurt and having a close relationship with Hamburg, both cities are very special places to me. I hope to see and meet many new faces and have some wonderful exchanges.
Your candy sculptures transform familiar everyday forms into oversized objects. What interests you about the moment when the familiar loses its sense of familiarity?
These objects and symbols come to me in everyday life – on walks, in parking lots, in supermarkets. It's the beginning of a new encounter with the object, stepping into a realm of magic and beauty. It might have been just a cigarette butt before, but then it transforms into strange curves and shapes, cracks, colours, associations. A certain distance between the object and the viewer is established through this transformation, making it possible to see the object in a new light, in its own right and space.
Your works exist between seduction, memory, and irritation. What role do these tensions play in the development of your sculptures?
I have always been drawn to the power of symbols, objects and universal images. I have been hoarding snippets and small objects since childhood. I draw huge inspiration from the energy they radiate, and try to manifest this in sculptural works. The space between seduction and irritation is fertile ground for that – a symbol is familiar and draws you in, but then it puts you out of whack when you look at it on the wall. I love how many different and strong reactions my sculptures evoke in people, especially when working with these seemingly simple images, like candies or cigarettes.
What role does scale play in shifting everyday objects away from their familiar perception?
Scale makes things stand out, makes fractures and odd forms obvious, enhances the off-ness of things. It can throw a shape you've seen a million times before in your face. Think of Mona Hatoum's Cheese Grater. You've never seen a cheese grater like that before, and after seeing Mona Hatoum's, you'll never see a cheese grater the same way again. I draw on this power of enlargement as well, to make the details and shapes I love about my sculptural forms – wrinkles, folds, cracks – more visible, to put them in the foreground. So we don't just see a candy, but we also see the weird twisted bits and parts, and how the light gets reflected there, and all the beauty that lies within it.
Your body of work brings together the candy sculptures and works from the Paradise series. What new themes or forms are you currently exploring, and in what direction would you like to develop your artistic practice?
I am working on a new body of sculptures that take these motifs one step further – larger-scale balloon sculptures exploring imagery of joy. I am drawn to flowers and floral shapes, the symbols of the non-human world, and the power of words. I'd like to create larger-scale works for outdoor spaces. I want to revisit the cigarette butts, and a series exploring the imagery of targets has been on my horizon for a while. But my practice always draws on these two strands: collecting images, objects, ideas and forms from the street, as in Paradise, and bringing them into a new sphere, giving them a new life and existence as sculptures.