ROOM 35
The show proposed will comprise from five to six sculptural forms composed of white woven plastic netting on wooden frames. Together these form a unified installation. All the pieces exhibited will be specially created for the space.
The quality of these nets is specifically designed as holders, transmitters, absorbers and reflectors of a significant aspect of the meditative process: light. The very quality of the materials used allows this play of light. Play of light emerging from the different textured and reflective surfaces makes the objets vibrate at their own pace.
The sculptures are composed of industrial strength plastic nets used for industrial purposes. This net material, so overdetermined by the industrial processes of modernity, is
however transformed in these objects into craft, via the hand woven technique employed to make these forms.
This work has a conscious forebear: the weaving of baskets by Shaker women – a practice which was conceived of, at one and the same time, as the creation of a pragmatic tool and a sacred meditative process of worshipping a divine creator.
The weaving is a simple and very human process. This process emulates the meditative experience; the repetition of the same action gives the sense of an endless process.
Through repetition of the same unit, which has no beginning or end, like an endless grid, I want to express this sense of timeless space. The unending repetition creates a meditative space like the internalisation of a mantra and the nets provide a shape that manifests this spirit.
The two significant words which describe the aim of these works is light and silence. These objects are shapes designed to both hold and reflect these two simple minimal dimensions: light and silence.
The final form of these objects grows from the point of making them. The weaving is part and parcel of a meditative process, a process which ends finally in a meditative space, that is the object itself. What is sought here, and what is signalled is silence – the creation of a space of meditative silence created from materials which are wholly industrial.
The dimensionality of these weavings is an attempt to make a shape which can embrace and hold the meditative emptiness.
Sydney August’98