Slovenly yet taut, plush yet geological, Patricia Ayres’ large-scale sculptures are towering bundles of contradiction. They are meant to be. Deriving, ultimately, from Ayres’ background in fashion – her knowledge of cut and stretch and fit – their materials are taken from that trade. Inspect their lumpen surfaces and you’ll find them delicate, composed of antique undergarments, garter belts, and elasticated fabric sourced from the Garment District. Yet they are the opposite of decorous. If the sculptures conjure a mode of femininity, it is one bursting with disruptive energy (comparable, perhaps, to the avant garde couture of Rei Kawakubo). Monumental sculpture has long been a heroic genre, associated with male achievement. These works provide a much-needed riposte: they are gargantuan heroines, barely contained, very close to spilling their guts, or swallowing you whole, or just spreading out, to take up as much damn space as they please.

Alongside these powerfully volumetric works, Ayres has also created a series of more geometric character – stepped octagons, low to the ground. Their centers are occupied by small grates, which turn out to have been sourced from church confession booths (the cross-shaped perforations are a giveaway). Perhaps they are objects to whisper into, and confide in? Yet there is a certain formality to them that discourages such intimacy. They could even be science fiction props: their ziggurat-like profiles remind you of the way that images of the future often deploy the imagery of the deep past. One could imagine them as portals to another world, or landing pads for extradimensional beings. In fact, standing in Ayres’ studio, I had the whimsical thought that her other sculptures, the galumphing giants, might have used them to beam down to Earth. Also, that they might have been continually reconfiguring themselves when I wasn’t looking. This implication of perpetual metamorphosis, of open-ended form, suggests that for all the power of her work, Ayres is just getting started. “I did love fashion,” she says. “But I love this more.”

- Glenn Adamson

SculptureCenter

2025

Patricia Ayres’ background in garment construction imbues her sculpture with an intimate understanding of the human body. She often repurposes materials from military equipment—like parachute harness hooks and thick elastic, originally designed for restraint and support— transforming them into uncanny, anthropomorphic explorations of vulnerability and tension. Ayres shapes this heavy-duty elastic into provocative forms, evoking a body constrained and bound. Each length of elastic is stained, stitched, dyed, tinted, and painted, acquiring a fleshy quality that suggests wounds, scarring, and wear. Her process is physical: she configures the resistant material into shape using her own bodily force. Her recent work has expanded in ambition, with structures increasing in scale and some appearing to levitate or hover in space. Ayres’ titles utilize a numbered coding system, referencing dogma within the Catholic Church. The numbers imply anonymity, as in serial identifiers in the carceral system or women’s dress form measurements. 2-12-1-14-4- 9-14-1, made for SculptureCenter, settles within its industrial setting. The sculpture’s bruised, skin-like tones sit in dialogue with the weathered textures of the building’s brick and steel, its imposing presence strong and uninhibited.

This Fall, Loaded Sentiments Take Us To Queer Places

Cultbytes

2025

All we have is longing for lost worlds, such is the case for Yu Ji’s Flesh in Stone – Spontaneous Decision No.4, 2025 and Patricia Ayres’ 2-12-1-14-4-9-14-1, 2025, both new commissions for Sculpture Center’s current group show to ignite our skin. Yu’s sculpture imagines an incomplete body forming and evolving from stone. Its fluctuating contour, yet to be fixed into legible shapes, is an investiture of pure potentials, a reminder of countless mythologies in which divine interventions sustain life cycles. Ayres’ larger-than-life, hovering flesh tower, made from heavy-duty elastic, can be read as an allegory for a spiritual wish toward a world of union among body, spirit, and logos, a world before flesh becomes burden. Yet again, reality strikes fast, rendering them monuments for the impossible, or excesses from the castrated imaginary of bodily omnipotence.

- Qingyuan Deng

VOGUE ITALIA ART, November 13, 2024, Ayres at the TANK Museum:

A journey into social restrictions with "Unrequited Remnants"

Hosted thanks to the contribution of the Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles, Unrequited Remnants by Ayres is a sculptural and provocative reflection on the constraints and norms that govern our society. Ayres' anthropomorphic sculptures, made with medical elastics, military and butcher hooks, as well as various dyes and varnishes, challenge visual conventions and physical limits through bold compositions and unusual materials. The works, born from the artist's training in the field of fashion, investigate the tension between the body and social structures of constraint, including incarceration, religion and physical ideals.

The exhibition explores themes of "impurity" and "taboo" with a theoretical approach inspired by Mary Douglas's work Purity and Danger, addressing the idea of "out of place" and the abject identities described by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter. The sculptural bodies of Ayres, covered with residues and waste materials, evoke physical and social instability, proposing "unacceptable" forms that challenge the boundaries of the recognizable and the normal. This powerful installation opens up a critical reflection on the process of abjection and on the standards that define the limits of social acceptability.

-Ricardo Freddo

Unrequited Remnants, Tank Shanghai

2024

Unrequited Remnants delves into the conventions and restrictions that define our contemporary society. The sculptural assemblages featured in the exhibition function as “matter out of place,” a concept Mary Douglas investigates in reference to dirt in her seminal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Enmeshed in gunk and residues, the forms' orientations vary with unorthodox postures, some dangling while others seemingly protruding from the earth. These unfixed allusions echo the instability of categorization akin to Judith Butler’s analysis in Bodies That Matter. Butler argues that the abjection of certain bodies and identities is crucial to the formation of normative subjectivity. Abjection, in this context, refers to the process by which what is deemed undesirable, unclean, or unnatural is cast out of the realm of the recognizable human, thus reinforcing the boundaries of what is considered “normal” or acceptable. Ayres’ anomalous abomination articulate the inaudible convictions.

- Tyler Christopher Brown

Articles of the Estranged, Matthew Brown Galley

 2024

Articles of the Estranged is a compendium of counterpoints, a proposal of movement fixed and transposed onto cross-stitched aberrations. The exhibition’s distinctive elements of suspension and tension, along with intermingling infrastructure and interiors, represent a point of departure. These sculptures function as facsimiles from a purgatorial pendulum, a psychological embodiment of a constricted condition. In this questioning of the concordat¹, these personified parturitions ask where the individual fits into the equation of church and state.

Incrementally, the seepage of architecture has become more pronounced in Ayres' work. It is ever-present in the appropriation of the 14th-century chapel of St. Nicholas, built on a bridge binding papal territories and lands of the French monarchy. Her sutured saint’s scale segues beyond the parameters of a body or bust and, in doing so, presents a paradoxical purview, situating the sculpture as a container of inquiry. One can fathom that all the other articles in this exhibition were once inhabitants of the behemoth—this issues a dual proposition concerning the motifs of constraint and expulsion as well as salvation and condemnation. The articles dispersed in the gallery become a catalog of a catastrophe, revealing a comparison between Ayres' saint and Walter Benijamin’s analysis of Angelus Novus.²

Aborted from their host, propagating appendages take on unworldly characteristics while maintaining an uncannily familiar objecthood. Defying gravity’s convictions, crucifix-like cadavers seem to be propelling themselves away from the wall. Burls on the busts and tops of totems insinuate a sort of forced replication. Segmented stains sit as signifiers of societal segregation. When intimately examined, these formidable figurations reveal the fragility of their fabrication. Flaws are filled with gunk, cleansed with wine, stitched shut, and painted over, then pushed forward.

This precession of production is eerily emblematic of processing seen within the prison system. Ayres' interest in the conditioning of the corporally confined is a plea for introspection. Can a sinner be saved? Can the saved be sinners? Is there sanctimony for those who sentence others to social death?³ Sewn shut, these subjugated semblances are hooked in suspended judgment, tethered taut with institutional hardware, and stand silent as markers of our Absurdist⁴ reality.

- Tyler Christopher Brown

1. Concordat refers to an agreement or treaty between the Vatican and a secular government relating to matters of mutual interest.

2. The Angelus Novus is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History” which outlines his theory of the “angel of history,” a melancholy view of the historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair.

3. Social death refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. It refers to when someone is treated as if they are dead or non-existent.

4. Albert Camus was a French philosopher and political activist, who outlined the absurd as the futility of a search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God, or meaning. Absurdism arises out of the tension between our desire for order, meaning and happiness and, on the other hand, the indifferent natural universe's refusal to provide that.

Sharpe-Walentas

Patricia Ayres constructs, fabricates, fashions, extraordinary presence out of the most unassuming materials. Her sculptures are typically armatures of wood and foam that are then wrapped in the stuff of clothing manufacture such as elastic synthetic and cotton, in a variety of wide swaths and smaller strips, often resembling bandages. The resultant anthropomorphic “figures” take on multiple poses, from the recumbent to the stridently erect. The range of art historical figurative associations range from Rodin’s Balzac monument to Hans Bellmer’s “poupee” sculptures, but also to the foam sculptures of John Chamberlain. The additional aspects of their sometimes belted restraints unavoidably call forth the S/M aesthetic of Nancy Grossman, but their careful yet spontaneous suturing seems closer to Lee Bontecou’s-more of a fabricated translation of somatic form than a anecdotal representation of such. The abject quality of their complex wrapping, ambiguously stained as they are in oils and paint, evokes a surprisingly empathetic response in the viewer, as if respectful of the experience and struggle such an accumulation of apparently random markings imply. What’s truly remarkable about Ayres’ sculptures is that they ultimately, with the proper amount of contemplation given to them, transform the ostensibly abject into the profoundly beautiful.

- Tom McGlynn

Critical Mass, Mendes Wood DM 

2023

In Critical Mass, Patricia Ayres articulates Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich.(1) Incongruity is echoed through nine pustulating sculptures, whose faceless forms distinguish themselves by their sutured topography, an amalgamation of stained United States military elastic, parachute hardware, and industrial detritus. Each vessel is riddled with ecchymosis,(2) composed of anointing oil, ashes, dye, ink, paint, gunk, and sacramental wine, an allusion to institutional coercion. Together these components harmonize the entanglement of Catholicism and the Carceral Archipelago’s pervasive impact on American society.(3)

The exhibition’s title, Critical Mass, speaks to the enigmatic sculptures’ conceptual foundation and bears the question of where these pirouetting manifestations situate themselves. Are they a requiem of familial transgressions in defiance of religious dogma? Are they indicative of a social tipping point? Or are the corset-like incarnations a meditation on the impact of incarceration? Ayres’ tethering inextricably stitches together the personal and institutional.

Whether positioned on concrete floors, placed on pedestals painted in correctional hues, or crucified on the gallery’s white walls, the dermic disruptions thematically contrast with the surrounding architecture. Ayres’ uncanny engagement with abjection is tangible in each composition’s inundated layering and meticulous idiosyncrasy, in reverence to Julia Kristeva’s feminist ideology of the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order.”(4) The anthropomorphic disfigurations operate as caricatures, connotations of classical sculptural forms such as busts and totems, yet are devoid of any familiar characteristics. Every cadaver-like iteration is processed and fitted with the numerical code representing a saint’s name, further nullifying a sense of humanity.

Critical Mass is a quandary, a rumination on how panoptic structures contort their subsidiaries. An asymmetrical assemblage of martyrdom where apostles stand in disparate arrays of decomposition. What is the residue of constraint, a perpetual occupation of the soul? These protuberant reliquaries remain reticent as silent rebuttals lie twined to the integument labyrinths.

-  Tyler Christopher Brown

1. Unheimlich is drawn from Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) which outlines an aesthetic category outside traditional designations of beauty, related instead to the terrible, unknowable, and fearful.

2. Ecchymosis refers to discoloration of the skin, usually caused by bruising.

3. The Carceral Archipelago is drawn from Michel Foucault’s 1975 publication Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punishment), referring to the mechanisms and technologies of prison systems.

4. Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and philosopher, who outlines categories of feminism centered upon resistance, woman-centered approaches to culture, and ultimately the creation of a sociopolitical order beyond gender. She also centers ideas of the abject in her psychoanalytic approach to aesthetic systems.

Becoming An Artist Is Not A Linear Path

Fountainhead Residency Yearbook

2022

A former fashion designer, sculptor Patricia Ayres depicts the body under systemic oppression—alluding to the human figure rather than recreating it in the literal sense. It was only after working in fashion (the artist earned undergraduate degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology and Brooklyn College, before earning her MFA from Hunter College in 2019, where she studied under Nari Ward), that Ayres realized her skillset from the fashion industry could serve her well in sculpture. Stretching and constraining materials like military elastic straps, metal hardware, padding, and wood, the resulting totemic creations exude sexual dominance and control, paired with elements of constraint borne from the artist’s upbringing in the Catholic Church.

Ayres’ work is geometric and crude, large-scale and raw—massive and vulnerable in equal measure—presenting a dynamic take on the human figure via neutral colors that evoke human skin in a manner entirely unlike what we’ve seen before. One might argue that the artist’s nonlinear path is responsible for this.

- Charles Moore

Patricia Ayres’ practice is fueled by fascination with the body - its role, presentation, transformation. Her anthropomorphic sculptural forms evoke the visceral and the uncanny. Often bound or hung by straps and butcher hooks, her works are created from stitched, wrapped, and stained strips of fabric, sewn elastic, various dyes, anointing oil, sacramental wine, iodine. That kind of material components come from an extensive lexicon of fashion the artists absorbed and perfected over the years. Her vividly striking objects, even though constructed out of unassuming materials, bring out an inherent sense of discomfort and disruption. Ayres’ works often explore a certain notion of anxiety, sexuality, and shame. There is undeniable tension embedded in Ayres’ practice - abstract yet vividly present - a tension between the bodily intimacy and limitations, pressures imposed by religion, or generally speaking by a variety of sociatal constraints, and the grotesque of that phenomenon.

-Galeria Wschód