10.21.2010

Specimens

Specimens
handspun cotton thread, graphite, and cotton rag paper
each is 4” x 6”
2009-2010


A couple of days ago this work returned home from Gallery 817. The collection of work in the show felt quite strong and associating this small series with other work refreshed my thoughts and got my mind churning in new directions.

Now that they are up on the wall at home again I find myself orienting  my body in their direction just to gaze at them in the brief pauses between tasks. Following the sinuous paths brings me to the many moments throughout my life where I've paused at the edge of darkened pools to stare into the ever patterned ripples of water or studied raindrops streaking down a window. If given the freedom of time, I will sit for hours, mesmerized, watching for the perfect repeat and never quite able to grasp them.

In many ways this collection excites the same feeling even as it satiates it.  An obsessive gaze is finally allowed to rest on preserved individuals for contemplative study. Here are only fifteen, but many more await capture.

6 comments:

mansuetude said...

love the way you title it specimens

as if you caught them writhing in a pond, shifting, transforming

it could be a language
if we could agree on its code.

Erin Curry said...

it delights me you appreciate the title.

spinners often call a new thread not yet tamed by water and weight "alive." It writhes against its new form remembering the recent chaos it came from, trying to find it's new balance. These are captured just after making.

i agree with you on the language, they are a tongueless story.

hope you are enjoying your november vacation away from the web of this place.

Susan Kruse said...

These are so beautiful and I can't help twinges of envy every time I see your work because I also worked with tangles but I never took it further or developed it as you have but I still feel great excitement and wonder at the beauty that is these forms. I agree with what mansuetude wrote about these being like language, perhaps mathematically they are...perhaps the falls of thread are linked in some way to chaos, to some arcane, numinous language of the cosmos. It is how I feel about random forms anyway, like the rain paintings I do. There is structure there because the physics of the thread, it's weight and structure, must inform the tangle shape and yet there is also the unexpected randomness.
Anyway, I do wish that I had had the skill to create some of the tangles work that you have done. Please blog more pictures of this work I do love it I do!

Marjojo said...

These are gorgeous. Such minimal work in a way, but the sinuous shapes conjure up so much. They seem to be in continuous motion, in all kinds of directions, connecting, disconnecting, unravelling, knotting up. Threads of stories interlinking, making relationships, getting entangled.
Thanks for your joy a while ago about Mien and me meeting! It was great how much it excited some of our blogger-friends too!

Marjojo said...

PS. Love what you say about threads being 'alive'.

Erin Curry said...

Susan it is high praise that you feel twinges of envy at my work. Thank you.

I've been struggling to articulate many of the things mentioned in the comments here. You say it so succinctly in referring to the link to "chaos, to some arcane, numinous language of the cosmos"

numinous ... what a wonderful word.

I wonder if other creatures spend so much time looking for pattern in chaos, looking for the order and wishing to understand it, perhaps they do as a survival technique.

As you say, my tangles as objects do have decipherable order, they do follow the rules of the universe, physical lines whose direction is determined by some force both intentional and random.

Creating them is an interesting way to make, to draw. There's a distance, a disconnect between the time the line is formed, its thickness, and character determined before its direction is, before it is laid in place.
I am collaborating not only with the thread and the material it consists of, but also my earlier self as the creator of the line.
And yet it's not entirely drawing either because the line is an object, sometimes folded it in my hands molded into a tiny loose ball before placing it down. teasing at it before letting it go.

Marjojo, yes yes yes! exactly that: storied threads, connections, entangled relationships . . .

I think hearing about you and Mien meeting in person felt so good to me because it makes this odd beautiful relationship we have with our blogger friends more tangible more real and simultaneously more fairytale like . . . that across oceans strangers that are friends can meet and see faces and hear voices.

back to the subject of tangles,
I've a great need to write a proper art statement about these things and so am trying to whittle down all my thoughts and musing about them into some semblance of order and sense.

Thank you ever so much for your feedback and thoughts and sharing your own work. Though I'm not here often these days it sustains me well.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...