First Love - Sculpture

First Love

Chicken Wire, cardboard, packing paper, synthetic hair, repurposed beads, repurposed curtain rod.

54" x 40" x 30"

First Love is a life-scale, two-part sculpture: a seated human figure playing a cello, both the player and the instrument built from the same recycled and repurposed materials — chicken wire, packing paper, cardboard, pantyhose, curtain rod, repurposed beads. Figure and instrument are inseparable, sharing origin, sharing material, sharing form.

The figure is fully realized as a human form. The body is rendered in dark pantyhose-wrapped chicken wire, the hexagonal mesh visible beneath the surface like skin over bone. Long hair cascades from the head in looped and curled wire. The figure leans into the instrument with physical commitment — not posed, but playing. Woven into the torso is paper printed with sheet music, as if the music lives inside the player's body, not just in the instrument.

The cello is built differently — lighter, more open. Kraft paper and packing paper are torn and layered in organic strips across the chicken wire armature, creating a body that is pale, textured, almost geological. The curtain rod serves as the bow, held in the figure's dark hand mid-draw. The two forms — dark figure, pale cello — are opposites made from the same materials. They belong to each other.

The piece sits in a simple wooden folding chair. That ordinariness is intentional. This is not a formal portrait. It is an everyday act of devotion — a person and the thing they love most, inseparable from the first time they touched it.

Every material in First Love was headed for a landfill. The packing paper, the cardboard, the pantyhose, the beads — objects discarded without ceremony. Craig Davoll's practice is rooted in the belief that thrown-away things still hold value, still hold memory, still hold form waiting to be found. In First Love, those materials become a player, become an instrument, become a love story made entirely from what others let go.