During a studio visit with Carol Diamond before her upcoming exhibit, Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me (Equity Gallery), our discussion of her recent sculptures elicits the term “Janus heads”–not because she makes two-headed portraits, but because each dynamic work encapsulates a battle of competing forces that hint at varying degrees of figuration and diverse human backstories.
Held together by epoxy and concrete, Diamond assembles her sculptures of urban and industrial materials: bits of metal, broken glass and mirrors, car parts, cables, fabric, wire mesh, wood, brick, and marble that support the starring roles played by broken liquor bottles, soda cans, marijuana dispensary pouches, food wrappers, sunglasses, nail polish, shoes, jewelry, and other colorful street trash. Her works culminate in an overwhelming sense of continuous, omnipresent consumption, manifesting an energetic collective presence that seems to be passing through, making do and living out loud amidst parks, buildings, subways, streets, buses, and cars.
Short, squat, crouching Helmut, a dome of window and reflective bottle shards set in concrete over a wire mesh form, is topped by spiky broken glass wings worthy of a Nordic goddess, playing off Helmut, a German name that can mean “healthy” or “battle,” joined with “spirit,” “mind,” or “mood.” Slightly taller,Silver Skirt suggests the physical vitality of Cyclops as an epoxy and concrete conglomeration of broken glass and marble over wire mesh that’s haphazardly topped by a single, metal-ringed, glass lens–a cloudy, blinded eye. Presented on twin wooden, silver-painted bases, both Helmut and Silver Skirt unify fierce exterior with inert, lumpen shape, hinting at a latent warrior myth proposed in shining, broken contemporary materials.
Prince cuts an extravagant profile as an assemblage of metal, glass, beads, nail polish, latex, and rooted to a chunk of old concrete. Bits of aluminum cans, beer bottles, wire mesh, flattened labels, and paper incorporate voids and color chunks, preserving surface impressions of the artist’s fingertips. Seen from one angle, a chunk of green Heineken glass opposite an embedded red taillight creates a crown of gemstones. Pieces and surfaces are willed and fitted into place over the concrete base, rooting the artist’s aura and loving touch on the memory of a sidewalk, street, or broken wall.
Opening larger voids between chunks of repurposed white and shiny used metal, glass, and plastic junk, Shipshape exemplifies Diamond’s airier baroque style. A sparkling high-heeled shoe, a light fixture bracket, PVC pipe, various gauges of crepe-like silver mesh, a metal bar, and what looks like a be-ribboned hard hat suggest a tough dame spending New Year’s Eve on a ladder. Shipshape mixes materials that feel tainted by humanity; former purpose mingles with mistaken identity and mixed-gender roles, creating gratifyingly complex narrative puzzles.
Air joins fire in two of her recent pieces that lean into femininity: Resilience coils a metal pigeon deterrence strip into a prickly, teardrop wreath of flayed, clear cerveza bottles, copper wire, epoxy, marble, and burnt-car-junkyard precipitate. Diamond treasures the latter’s unique, charred, lace-like appearance that integrates beauty, fragility, and toxicity. Resilience compresses the contemporary Girl Boss and the 1950s femme fatale into one fashionably ruffled collar or a circular argument. Woman assembles this treasured scorched lace with gadgets, chains, fasteners, a safety pin, a car headlamp housing, brick, cables, metal, plastic shrapnel, and more, leaving plenty of empty space and things unexplained within the outlines of a female body.
16 x 16 in.
16 x 16 in.
When we were looking at Woman, Diamond recalled a friend who suggested questioning each of the many trinkets and gadgets comprising her sculptures. Such advice would undermine the freedom Diamond naturally creates. Chaotic, ambiguous, unidentifiable, and unnecessary moves on and inside Woman recreate and suspend the overloaded mood of deciding what’s important and what’s not; they leverage the laziness of walking down the street without seeing and the fear of what gets decided for us.
As adept at subtraction as she is at addition, Light Moves marks Diamond’s most reduced and formal assemblage of what looks like antique light-shade glass and cable wire, epoxied together into pleasing white and transparent intersecting baroque curves, their frozen motion enhanced by delicate, tendril-like copper wire filigree.
Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me works chaotically and formally, hinting at stubborn human flash fiction. In her sculptures, time is like water, and she combats potential leaks by building and crowding out. Diamond describes her work as “artifacts for the future,” and is tuned both to the question “How raw can I be?” and tikkun olam (“repairing the world”). Her works make me think of collective human will as a universal, humorous by-product, randomly and indifferently compacted: her pieces elevate trash, without shrinking from the trash in our values.
Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me, at Equity Gallery 245 Broome Street
New York, NY 10002. May 14 –June 6, 2026. Wednesday to Saturday, 12 PM – 6 PM.
About the writer: Elizabeth Johnsonis a painter, curator, and art writer. She contributes to Two Coats of Paint, Roborant Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. This is her second contribution to Art Spiel. Raised on a farm in Pennsylvania, Johnson graduated from Bard College, lived in San Francisco, and currently lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. She paints multidimensional space based on digitally manipulated, curved, and warped images. She has participated in group shows in the past year: “In the Heat of Becoming,” at Collective Z Gallery in New York, NY; “Bending the Arc,” at Perry Lawson Fine Art in Nyack, NY; “Seen and Unseen” at The Painting Center in New York, NY; “75 A-One,” at Silvermine Art Center’s Annual Juried Exhibition, in New Canaan, CT; “Equinox” at Millersville University in Millersville, PA; “Drawn from Life 2025: Identify,” at Upstream Gallery in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY; and “Flotsam and Jetsam,” at 490 Atlantic in Brooklyn, NY. A solo show with Collective Z gallery will open in November 2026. @elizjohnson2018