Mark Jenkins :: Street Sculptures




These incredible street sculptures of people stuck in the most uncompromising positions are proving so convincing worried pedestrians have been reporting them to the ambulance service and police.

Innovative American artist Mark Jenkins travels the world placing his unusual temporary artworks in busy urban areas. His aim is to get people to look up from their mobile phones for a split second and engage with the world around them.

He started his career by placing a figure in a refuse dump in Rio de Janeiro to draw attention to children living in the streets. Unusually he uses box-sealing tape to create the figures before sometimes adding clothes for interaction on the street.

A recent series of sculptures involved castings of baby dolls placed in cheeky situations such as one on an underwear billboard which appears to be suckling a woman's breast.



"I like getting people to question their surroundings, what is real and what isn't. These days, people are so buried in their mobile phones and I just wanted to get them to look up.

So at the beginning, I was collecting social data about people's reactions. But six years later, these images are more about poetry, of capturing a magical moment.

They often tend to be marginalized individuals, sometimes in lonely states, so it's poetic but also dark.

For example, the guy in the river is holding a bunch of colored balloons that are almost trying to magically lift him out. There's always an undercurrent of hope.

I was trying to start a campaign, like a graffiti artist would with a tag -- apart from I did it with an invasion of babies.

I felt I had introduced a new medium and the baby was symbolic of that, as well as being symbolic of not being cared for like insects that have to care for themselves.

Also it was a way to experiment, an exercise in space. We always try to put some up whenever we go to a new city as part of my project. Here in Berlin we've put the babies up pretty high using a ladder, but people tend to get them down anyway, like an adoption process."








Barcelona








Bordeaux








Dublin








Fairfax








London








London








Malmö








Malmö








Puerto del Rosario








Rio de Janeiro








Royan






Royan



 



Seoul







Tudela







Warsaw







Washington DC







Washington DC







Winston Salem







Winston Salem







Winston Salem