cobweb 3
The plastic netwraping is a farming material used to contain large round bales to keep a compressed shape until they are fed to the cows over the course of winter. Once the bale has been placed in the bale ring, the netwrap is cut off, bundled in a few swift motions by the farmer, and tossed into a pile to be dealt with come spring. I collected one of these piles and used fractions of a bale ring to contain it. I was thinking about the parallel of the treatment of my own body to the treatment of the commodities of agriculture- control, manipulation, restraint- as well as ideas of consumption, waste, cycles, habits, and sustainability within agricultural practices.
Tarble Arts Center, Charleston, IL, 2018
cobweb 2
I combined the new farming technology, netwrap, (a replacement for the outmoded bailing wire or black twine) with a spiraling steel representation of time. Contemporary farming practice is full of constant consumption of material that is perpetually discarded and replaced. Improvements have led to the gauzy, ethereal netwrap being the optimal material for wrapping bales of hay, leaving its aesthetic opposite, black glossy twine, discarded. Rather than leave this plastic to be burned or buried, I have collected it to illustrate the concept of society’s constant outmoding and consumption of new material. Through my processing of this refuse, I am taking something valueless and providing an illusion of its worth.
The “woven” form is comprised of specifically angled sections of steel rod welded into a portal. This shape alludes to sacred geometry and the spiraling Golden Ratio as witnessed in nature. In the work, I consider our perception of the passage of time and how it seems to speed up and slow down. I am interested in the obscure tools we subconsciously use to measure time outside of the manmade construct of the clock; the devices we use as a measuring stick to orient ourselves within time and space. Evidence of the passage of time; fingernails growing, a wound healing, hunger, birthdays, seasons, sun rises and sets, menstrual cycles, gestation cycles, birth and death, relationships beginning and ending, hair falling out or graying, obsolete technology, the accumulation of stuff; the ebbs and flows of life on a micro and macro scale that illustrates movement through existence.
My piece explores these notions and asks, how does time exist outside of our own dim light that is constantly fading?
Charleston, IL, 2017
cobweb 5
Herman Maril Gallery, College Park, MD,
COBWEB 4
College Park, MD, 2018
cobweb 1
Iowa City, IA, 2015