unmakings

some new work:

commercial pattern abstract forms with wire seams

'bulb forms' (not a title, just what i've been calling them)
pantihose, straw, batting, tinsel, plaster, rubber cement, elmers, tulle, doilie

still figuring out the next step for these 'bulbs'. they differ from my other more systematic work because they are more concerned with layered processes and the act of making than creating rule systems. i still feel unclear about these pieces; i found myself saving pantihose, probably for a year now, because i knew they were interesting to me. i wanted to cut them so they were flat and stretch them over things, but i started stuffing them and knitting them up with very big knitting needles, and it all started happening very organically. i had an idea to embed them into the wall ala henrique oliveira-- they are textile-based things, coated in construction materials; its then that what they are made of becomes abstracted and closer to both body/skin bubble-ups, and also could be some sort of weird growth in a plaster wall. sort of goes with what i was thinking about with projecting knitting stop-motion movement onto walls to make the wall appear to crawl or have its own weird agenda. i was also thinking they could be embedded into garments and become more literal body explosions, but they do suggest the body already without garment present.
as for the wire pieces-- the wire travels along the seam lines of the forms. i want to try making some out of maps, using the highways as a system for where the wire 'seams' should go.
in my last post i was reading the eva hesse book from my post 1945 art history class in college, and i really liked how she talked about art being a way for people to make use or reel in the chaos around them. that art is where people (both artists and viewers) funnel their desire FOR chaos, and its the artist's job to figure out how they want to sculpt or hide or order that chaos. its the chaos that helps the artist (and the viewer) feel alive when they are participating in the work. this really touched me: i use maps and patterns and knitting as systems, almost mathematical or rule-based as source material, yet i work in mostly a whim-like way. i use the system driven materials to give some semblance of order, yet my making process can be very chaotic. so the map sculptures: i was thinking about maps as objects. they are made to point you to something-- a house, a treasure, a post office, a city, a country, a field. often the thing they point to is unknown, foreign, undiscovered to the person looking. what lost place to i want to point to in using maps? i like the idea of suggesting something to point to, even if it is just a hunch.