Compression. Tension. Suspension

works

The Sumter Piece: A slight return, 2017

60,000 wooden coffee stir sticks woven in place and held by tension, 3,600 coffee cup sleeves stacked one inside of another, braided aluminum cable, ferrules, eye hooks

Meandering Ground Line, 2017

Cafe Bustelo Espresso, acrylic resin, Birch plywood, mending plates

The Sumter Piece: A slight return is one in a series of concurrent installations. In particular, it is a companion piece to Hickory Sticks, my comprehensive installation exhibition on view at The Hickory Museum of Art May4 – September 9, 2017. In a larger sense, it is a callback to my third site piece created in Patriot Hall in 2007.  Although there have been 10 years and 50 installations since my first visit to Sumter, there is something poetic about only moving down the hall to create my latest work. With the installation in the gallery, I wanted to draw a line between and connect the two floating walls and create an experience that allows the viewer to navigate the space in a new way. The wall piece is a drawing using espresso grounds to mimic the movement of the sculpture through the space. The drawing  has elements of larger wall drawings I have been making. As with all the work in this series, materials are chosen and removed from the world of the contemporary coffee shop. The sticks and sleeves are chosen not only for their visual and structural uses, but also for their connection to the hand. The wooden sticks and cardboard coffee cup sleeves are materials handled in an everyday context. I remove these materials from the coffee shop and bring them back to the gallery to create my work. I have intentionally used no adhesive or additive in the creation of the work, but instead rely on the transformative power of labor and the physical properties of the materials. The  sculpture materials are only altered through hand arrangement. The show title Compression. Tension. Suspension. refers to the physical state of the materials and the mental state of the artist.