the last chair-pair is done! Here is some background information on how it fits into Suspended Now, The Weight of Waiting, my June exhibition in the Crypt at Saint Lukes in Cork that I’m really fortunate to present with the wonderful support of Sample Studios/Tactic:
Chairs were filling up my sketchbooks.
I was working with chairs because they represented a platform of stagnation and waiting but I also wanted them to resist and defy time and space. The brilliant reading material I was researching about devaluing the time of the vulnerable often angered me (more about this in the next post) and I wanted the chairs to start a quiet rebellion. They were destabilised, turned upside down and suspended, to point away from the considered norm and introduce a sense of resistance and freedom.
Weaving traditionally is associated with time consuming, repetitive labour and so it was the perfect technique to create the sculptures that are about time and waiting. I also set a goal that could only be achieved by long hours of work every day for months. This has altered objective time keeping. I was waiting to be done and as I was waiting I was shifting in and out of the present, not moving fast enough to see progression but too committed to step out of it.
Chairs were now filling up the house, the studio, even the car turned into seventeen seater for a brief journey.
and now they are ready for suspension.
More to come about the preparation in the next post…