William Fillmore

Dummy: Unloved and useless I sit rejected for all time.

My work is nostalgic for something lost and fantastic. I revere the traditions of object making and wallow in my passion for satirical confrontation. I make objects that satisfy both the haunting surrealistic inspiration of my boyhood spent watching cartoons and reading comic books and the optimistically fatalism of my present state of being as an artist and educator. My work sarcastically pushes back at the boundaries and pressures that I endure as a participant in and observer of American Culture.  

I made this work as a vigil to all of those times in my life where I failed not on accident but because I was a failure. In those moments I felt rejected not from society but from myself. In meditating on these experiences and in creating this sculpture, I found compassion for myself in those low moments, and for those around me when they are suffering from life.


William Fillmore is a surrealistic sculptor living in working in the Hudson Valley of New York. Working in multiple sculptural disciplines from ceramics, cast metal, and fabricated steel, William’s sculptural works feature the pain and beauty found in memories forgotten and discarded.