yours unless you stop noticing it
yours unless you stop noticing it 2022 cast handmade abaca paper, bamboo with cable ties & wire, fabric 11’ x 8’ x 5’
August 9, 2022 we installed it and got to see it gently rotating about 25’ in the air in the tall, spacious, light-filled atrium in the Stream at Edgewood College, Madison WI.
We’ve been working on this for 5 months in a windowless grey studio suspended barely 3’ off the ground. We’ve never shown a hanging piece or one with much bamboo. This atrium space inspired us to change that.
After this photo was taken, we added some hefty poles to make the piece transportable. The poles seem to finish the piece so we left them on.
Guy asks, "This your artwork?" "Yep, but it's yours for the next couple of months unless you stop noticing it. Then it's nobody's."
Making abstract art in a time of violent, hateful, uncertain crises is good for our heads. Showing that work is also good for something.
To counterpoint the architecture, we decided to make something wobbly, fragile, floaty, loose-limbed, skeletal, curvy. Handmade, colorful, but not too multi-colored.
To make the flimsy thing transportable, we temporarily lashed it to thicker poles with cable ties. Instead of caging, this framework houses the original piece. The framework became part of the work.
The change was inadvertent. Art happened; we noticed, nodded and let it.
yours unless you stop noticing it
A piece belongs to anyone who is seeing it right now. When a piece becomes invisible to the daily passersby, it becomes disowned and lost.