Sculpture
I used to forget I had a body.
I was invisible to myself. I had an idea of who I was, held in my mind, and I could not see the parts of me that were different from the idea. It was like living in a glass case.
Then chronic injury and personal loss broke me. I could no longer be the person I imagined. My body asserted itself with pain and immobility, filled my head with fog, and forced me to come to terms with reality. Merely acknowledging my body wasn’t enough. The clouds did not lift until I learned to live in it.
This made me curious about the invisibility of bodies in art and furniture. Picture frames are invisible. You look right through them, looking for the idea carried by the image inside. You don’t see the body, the wood, glass, and hardware that gives the image a home to live in. The labor and architecture of that body is hidden in plain sight.
I strive to make these bodies visible, giving them opportunities to flex and explore on their own terms. I repurpose the traditional vocabulary of picture frames, giving each material new jobs to play with. The forms are not dictated by function—their only job now is to be themselves—but they are shaped by the labor they are built to perform.
You too have a body shaped by labor. These empty frames are curious about you, but they will not remember you. You can only know each other during this moment, mutually present, as long as you both are looking.
The body of a picture frame often goes ignored.
The taut wire strung over a nail, the paper that allows humidity to reach equilibrium, the miter joints holding everything together—the work of a picture frame is invisible labor. How can I make it more visible? How can I celebrate it?
When I was a kid, I watched gymnastics goofing around after the Olympics. I remembered seeing a man who normally competed on rings taking a tumbling pass, hurling himself through the air with unbelievable strength. He riled up the crowd, flexed after each pass. He had the casual confidence of a virtuoso who was off the clock.
Years later, I wondered if I could do the same with picture frames. Could I place the materials and mechanisms of picture frames into new, impractical circumstances? How might a picture frame flex its muscles if it no longer had an image to protect?
Two Sisters was one such experiment. I rotated the materials: on the left is a thin wooden frame with picture wire resting on a nail speared through a scrap of canvas. On the right, a wire frame with a length of string balances on a nail speared through a wood shaving.
I was not sure the role of the wall in all this. The wall felt like a canvas, obvious and unassuming. I wondered what it would feel like for picture frames to disappear into the wall, somehow drawing more attention to themselves as they retreated from the outside world.
To answer that question, I made The Swimmers.
All my sculptures include a kind of puzzle, a mechanical question. For this piece, the question was how both how to cut it and how to mount it. The extremely sharp angles where it meets the wall required odd jigs to cut and custom hardware to hold.
Samson is a piece under incredible strain. After hanging, the thin columns are wedged between the upper and lower joists. The turnbuckle in the center is cranked hard, causing the columns to bend inward. The piece is unstable. Without the wall behind it, it would twist and collapse. The wall is not just a place to hang the frame. It is a part of the frame’s structure, albeit temporarily.
Some chairmakers will cheat the inside edges of each leg, creating a slight bow in the side rails. This concave bow actually adds strength to the structure.
When wood is under the right kind of tension, it gets stronger. But if the structure cannot handle that tension, or if the forces are out of balance, the body will collapse.
Is there a way the canvas can still have a supporting role without having to be under such incredible tension?
In Girl, an hourglass-shaped picture frame is cinched at the waist by raw canvas. A running stitch tied at the back makes the canvas into a skirt. The string is tied in a loop to hold the whole thing together. The low center of gravity causes the whole frame to swing forward. It looks best hung high.
The hips of the frame are hidden beneath the skirt. Girl’s hips, waist, and shoulders are proportioned after Venus.
But glass is physical too. The most ephemeral thoughts still live in a brain, in a head, in a body.
With Leap, I started to investigate how glass can be a kind of connective tissue. I drilled holes in the glass and threaded cut wood though them, creating an illusion of continuity. It looked like the glass was cutting through the wood, but actually it was the wood that was penetrating the glass.
A hidden nail lifts Leap from the bottom. A second nail with a length of picture wire allows the structure to swing to the left. The overall effect makes it look like it is jumping away from its mounting point.
The glass acts as ballast: the bow of the pine strip is due both to the tension in the copper picture wire and the weight of the glass. The bowed shape narrows the effective width of the slot, lifting the glass.
Would the glass triangle slip through the slot if the strip weren’t under tension? I forget.
This hung above my bedroom doorway for years, a constant threat. It never fell.