A net, a nest, the things we carried | 2022
- a collaboration with Monica C. LoCascio
Let your thoughts be content. The art of conversation, the art of silence.
…not only our memories, but also the things we have forgotten are “housed”. Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms”, we learn to “abide” within ourselves.
Gaston Bachelard, 1994. The Poetics of Space.
We started out with a frame, two meters high, one meter wide. Monica had had it made for a previous project, it was this size so she could fit inside of it. Now that we hung it perpendicular to the floor, we could both sit or stand within the boundary. What ever we made would carry us both.
Archetypally [sic], to untangle something requires a decent, the following of a labyrinth down into the underworld or to the place where matters are revealed in entirely new ways. One must follow what at first appears to be a convoluted process, but in effect is a profound pattern for renewal. In fairy tales, to loosen the girdle, undo the knot, untie and untangle means to understand something previously closed to us, to understand its applications and uses, to become mage-like, a knowing soul.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 1992. Women who run with the wolves.
To make this piece, we played many games of give and take, adding and subtracting whilst making and un-making then remaking the vessel we were crafting to carry our thoughts in.
The un-doing of things allows for you to see the mistakes, re-group and re-organise. It also reminds you that sometimes the spontaneous accidents are the best, and if your vagus nerve says leave it, you should probably listen.
Identity is changed by the journey; our subjectivity is recomposed… [it] is not to do with being but with becoming.
Mandan Sarup, 1996. Identity, Culture and the Post Modern World.
The piece which started as a potential boat, became a vessel, a net, a shipwreck, a nest, a seedpod, a cacao, a shell, a cocoon. The materiality of the piece is what keeps this work constantly becoming.