Recent Work - Forms woven from tissue paper

Recent Work

Forms woven from tissue paper

Forms positioned in corridor

I made another hanging form, this time with soft toilet tissue paper, using the technique of winding and wrapping threads of the twisted paper around the form, but, because of the nature of the material, engendering an outcome that suggests extreme fragility and tactile softness.  I have to twist the tissue tightly to create a fragile thread with which to weave; and as I twist and wind my material I wonder what kind of creature would create this form. In a way I am simulating the growing of a living organism. My hands, eyes, mind and the material are together evolving it. As I work with the material I feel its haptic nature and tensile strength, the limits of its possibilities in construction, how it seems to create its own loops, whorls and inter-windings, informing my hands how to manipulate it. I am creating a form organically, in a way similar to a being that creates itself from its internal blueprint, its own D.N.A. For, when I begin to make I have no fixed idea of what that object will be in the end; I have the germ of an idea, but it always changes. Things happen along the way, a chance discovery takes me in an entirely new direction that I hadn't foreseen. This is the excitement of making. How strange to make something and not know what it will be, like a child playing in the sand, just experimenting, but with endless possibilities.

 

The outcome of this experiment is quite incongruous; the intricately woven ovular shapes, for I have made a field of them, seem to stand impossibly on insubstantial tendrils of cotton that could suggest roots rising into a vegetable seedpod or the filaments supporting a chrysalis. The complexity and fragility of the elongated stem prompts questions in the viewer: From what is it made? How does it hold together? What is stopping it unravelling?

 



Detail of stem section