In the past year I have latched on to the medium of woven sculpture. The thick rope fabric that I weave has a freedom/malleability/potential for collapse that reminds me of the human body. The process of making my sculptures is slow, and I cannot see the contained form until the very end when I close it off. Until that point it is an open container that I have to flex and fold in order to reach the shape that I want. It is a process of repetition, where several tiny changes elaborate on each other in ways I can only attempt to control—every curve and turn in a piece is a trend, a series of similar choices made one after another.
I am inspired more by the ways in which I do not have control over my art than the ways in which I do. I am conversing with my work—I learn from it. As I make them I think of the rings of rope building on each other like sediment layers or human generations—each builds off the one before and by the time one has finally come to the end of the circle, the next is already beginning. I think about how I became the person I am today, what pieces of my life stacked on to each other to raise me this way and which stacks toppled so that I could start building again in a different direction. It is only fitting that they come out looking so human, with gesture and wrinkles, lumps, and scars; loose strings.
Of course we afflict each others’ bodies and our own, creating scars, stretch marks, botox—I mean, our entire being came out of two individual’s feelings nine months before we even existed. But there are ways in which our own minds afflict our bodies, too. Over the last year I engaged in a type of therapy called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) which is concerned with exactly these hidden causes of sickness. To make a long and overly personal story short, I stopped experiencing the chronic headaches I had been having since kindergarten because of the work I did in therapy. As my sculptures take shape, I imagine they are beings of their own, whose form is influenced by each pass under the needle. Each mistake I make, each material I incorporate and angle at which I sew, expresses itself in the completed object. They are soft and malleable, yet hold form without stiffener or internal structure. And I think they have a certain elegance because of that.
I recently read the first novel by one of my very favorite filmmakers and thinkers David Cronenberg. Like all his work, this novel focused on the sublime and sickening capacities of the human body. (I think this novel may have been his outlet for his thoughts that were too filthy for the screen.) The body is itself an art. It is an expression of our inner selves, our thoughts and experiences, as well as an object in which we find beauty and horror—something we change over time, often painstakingly and with caution, but sometimes very quickly and by accident. My work is a process of decisions and material limitations—a process of knowing myself and the world.