2021
Annealed steel wire, copper wire, Japanese paper, found brick.
14 x 29 x 156 inches.
This sculptural installation explores metamosphosis as an interplay of forces. The paper drapes around the wire structure shaped to evoke the flow of water through a tree bark, the copper wire sedimenting into nodes the various tensions that threaten to collapse the structure. The steel wire is vertically anchored to the ceiling, like a chrysalis on a tree branch, keeping the structure erect while pinned by a brick. This brick is a metaphorical ground; it originated from the ground, from the extraction of minerals, and it is shelter. It is materials with which to construct houses, yet also the reminder of bygone things, of empires through revolutions, of ideologies through architectures.
The work is investigates metamorphosis; the transformations at the interphase between the larval phase and the emergence of the butterfly. The enigma of what happens at this interphase - the exchanges of water, nutrients, fibers, minerals - is a potent window for the whims of the imagination.
In his seminal work Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Theodor Schwenck reasons that the foundation of all living organisms is its shaping by water and air. The torsions, spirals, fibrils and rivulets of which organisms are shaped from their inceptions as embryos and seed to the gradual formation of skeletons, shells and roots to the striations and forms in muscles and bark, are testaments of the meandering of these fluid entities, of the tandem of air and water across and through these foundational living structures. The word meander itself has its etymology from the Greek Maiandros, the name of a river in Asia Minor (present day Turkey) which flows in very pronounced rhythmic loops. Water and air burrow rhythmically into their surroundings while being subjected to the course of time which gradually alters both the spatial arrangement of the meander and of the fluid entities themselves. Could it be posited that water and air conserve a memory of their course through living matter? Water would then be the embodiment of various forces penetrating through the material world, air like ethereal fluxes of forces, both imparting their memories onto the material world in which living beings grow.