BAO

November 2020: This project was to, “make anything out of wire”...

"As a child, I loved working with wire, I made a series of intricate trees and had an army of men ranging from abstract and fluid, to representative. They were made from spools of steel wire and champagne muselets that I collected over time and straightened with only my fingers. I still keep one of these wire men and two wire trees on my desk at home. I made most of my little army when I was around 11, and I heavily associate wire with my childhood, a period that I feel has more conclusively ended this year as the world has changed so dramatically. My eyes have been opened to many issues and cold realities. From the bigotry in our country that is projected around the world, the BLM movement, the pandemic that brusquely shut down big personal goals that I had set, and my growing anxiety about the Climate Crisis, I feel that I have grown a bit more cynical, and that a decent chunk of that childish light and innocence has been taken from me, and I’m sure from a lot of you, too.

When given this extremely open ended assignment, I thought of Ruth Asawa and the magic that she creates with wire, different weaving practices that I was exposed to in Spain and, for a brief time before Covid, in Peru, and my mum, who is a knitter, and the knitting experiments that I did during quarantine. I was excited by the idea of creating a material or surface out of wire that called back to these experiences, so I played with different weaving and chainmail techniques. I eventually landed on a simple weave because with a wire a few gauges too thick, it allowed me to maintain some cleaner lines within a potentially chaotic medium.

I wanted to use light and shadow to create elements of duality that evoke memories to call back to my past experiences with wire, and how I am reminiscing on my childhood now. In my original sketches, a light hangs from below, casting a shadow onto the ceiling. This invites the viewer to look back on the past, but to see a version that is distorted by their current perspective or place in life. The structure begins wide and narrows down like a funnel, also representing the stress that I am currently feeling about having to declare a major and decide a path. Where will I find myself on the other side of the funnel? Right now I feel like I have to constrain myself, and I feel trapped by the current state of the world. I am in the narrow, bottom part of the form, waiting to be spit out into a world hopefully as open and broad as the beginning. Though this time is shocking, there is still a vast future to try to be excited for, and a beautiful past to be grateful for that’s projected on the ceiling :)

I’m currently in isolation housing because I was potentially exposed to covid, so the light fixture didn’t really happen (yet) so I just played with the shadows from my phone flashlight, and made this little compilation video filmed on my laptop."