Rope Works

Rope Work is a continuation of my visual, philosophical and ecological enquiry relating to memory, space and architecture. The series encompass material experiments with carpentry and textiles inspired the work of Annie Albers and Tim Ingold’s writing - The Life of Lines *. 

I traced around wooden templates such as a section of a table, a wooden mantlepiece and a set triangle. The paper is cut reminiscent of a textile, patterned with colourful oily pastel lines and layers of black carbon ink.

Binding the ropes around the wooden structure reminded me of the work my mother did in preparing the wool for washing after spinning and unpicking jumpers to be reknitted into rugs. I would stand with my arms apart as she bound the wool round and round.

…if you untie a knotted rope, however much you try to straighten it, the rope will retain kinks and bends and will want, given the chance, to curl up into similar conformations as before. The memory is suffused into the very material of the rope, in the torsions and flexions of its constituent fibres. So it is, too, with timbers that have been joined. They may be pulled apart, and used in other structures, but will nevertheless always retain a memory of their former association.*

The Life of Lines by Tim Ingold. Isbn 978041557686. Published 2015 by Routledge

Rope Work was exhibited at ANCA Gallery in Canberra with Sylvia Griffin and Penny Coss, May 2022.