The Bell Curve is a partial ‘summary’ of great moments in High Modern sculpture, reinterpreted through accumulations of found and cast objects and materials. Each work is a form of ‘three-dimensional collage’ or, more particularly, an overlay of seemingly dissonant elements – art and design, abstraction and function, geometry, representation and psychology – referencing the major signifiers of the High Modernist era, and formed into concise physical emblems of life in contemporary culture.

The physical form of these works are drawn from Mestrom’s meditations on – and recollections of – their original counterparts: an accumulated impression built up over her life-time of looking at art history books and museum walls, wall calendars and coasters. Through popular culture’s process of averaging, these complex and idiosyncratic sculptural ‘moments’ have had their edges shaved off; they have become simplified, softened, homogenized. And yet the status imposed on these Modernist originals looms large, continuing to exert their influence over us, as both artists and lookers.

By drawing on the visual language of these modernist signifiers, Mestrom’s intention is to take something familiar and manipulate it into something which challenges our perpetual awareness of what actually constitutes the ‘real’ – thereby sharpening our senses, giving shape to unseen forces and leaving the perceived world looking clearer and stranger. Through the process of addition and subtraction, the sculptures embody the lingering remainder of their initial grand gesture – a distant echo – softer, and softer, but persistent.