Coming out of the hangers and the spoons and the paper plates, I wanted to do a picture with cats in it. And I knew that, from a technical point of view, just technical, a cat is almost impossible to control. And in 1980, wanting these small F-stop, wanting great depth of field, wanting a picture that was sharp throughout, that meant I had to have long exposures, and a cat would be moving, would be blurry, would maybe not even be there, so blurry. So it just kind of occurred to me to sculpt a cat, just out of the blue, because that way the cat would be frozen. I had a few interesting personal decisions to make, because once I realized that a real cat would not work for the piece, then the next problem was, well, am I going to sculpt it or am I going to go find it? And I think in all of Modern Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, we have a large, long, lengthy tradition of finding things. Like from Marcel Duchamp, finding things in the culture and bringing them into your artwork, dislocating them. And I felt as though if I went out and found a cat, bought one let’s say at Woolworths, a tchotchke type of cat. That it wouldn’t be coming from my soul and my heart. It would be, in a sense, taking the culture’s representation of a cat and I wanted this kind of deep, authenticity. This was the rupture that I had with conceptualism and minimalism, which which I was deeply schooled in in the 70s. So this idea of trying to find a way to include my spirit, my feeling, my limitations, too, because the cats aren’t perfect by any means. But the other thing that happened as I was sculpting the one cat is that it didn’t look like a cat. So now I was on the journey of what makes something look like a cat? I mean, is it the tail? Is it the feet? Is it the gesture? So, that catapulted me into a process of repetition that I did not foresee. And that process of repetition, really was a process of trying to get better at the sculpture, better at the mimicist. I’d bring people into my studio and say, “What does this look like? What kind of an animal does it look like?” So I probably made about 30 or 40 plaster cats and I ended up throwing out quite a few, little by little, because I hated them. I mean they didn’t look, they just looked like a four legged creature. And I decided, as I was looking at this clustering of activity, that more cats looked better than one or two cats. So this sort of clustering and accumulation, which was present in a lot of minimalism and conceptualism, came in to me through this other completely different way of representative sculpture. Excerpt from an interview at Holden Luntz Gallery https://www.holdenluntz.com/magazine/photo-spotlight/the-constructed-environments-of-sandy-skoglund/