Project 1: Process
ARTIST RESEARCH

Jackie Winsor

Jackie Winsor has a very cohesive body of work that centers on simple geometric forms with a primitive feeling. She works with rope, twine, wood, copper, nails, and other ordinary materials. The majority of her work is constructed with unraveled rope that she winds around logs or other structural pieces of wood. Through this monotonous process of binding she creates irregular textural intricacy. While she is associated with Minimalist sculptors, Winsor’s work has an “attachment to ritual and pre-industrial modes of workmanship” . Her pieces consist of laborious handmade construction, which she learned from being around her father who was an architect, and built several houses . The force of the ocean and the rugged cliffs in her hometown also influenced her, since they had a substantive quality and presence that she later tried to attain in her work. In an interview with Whitney Chadwick, Winsor said that it was important for her to physically and visually build a sense of energy that equated with the presence of her materials so that she could reach an equilibrium. She also did this through the combination of soft, organic forms and geometric, gridded structures. For instance, in her 1971 sculpture Bound Grid Winsor deviates from the perfect Minimalist grid, and instead creates an organic, imperfect grid of wood bound by hemp. The irregularities and resultant negative space of the final form are compelling for both their simplicity and textural complexity.
Winsor’s art is process-oriented because her sculptures result from extremely repetitive, laborious actions. Since she focuses on human labor, she takes the time to personally unravel thousands of pieces of thick weathered rope to make twine. The primitive forms she creates by wrapping the twine over long periods of time embody the slow process of accumulation. In her sculpture, Four Corners (1972), Winsor spent “four full days a week for six months” constructing the fifteen-hundred-pound wood and hemp sculpture. This sculpture is a square made from four 2-foot by 2-foot logs that are meticulously wrapped with “thousands of feet of twine”1. Since she began as a painter, she often thought of her sculptural shapes as drawings with lines that go around and around. This, she said, made her forms fatter until they became a shape and had substantial energy. Although she was a painter, she never works with drawings or prints, but instead spontaneously manipulates her materials “like a dance”3. By focusing on the repeated process, she achieves forms that are derived from the character of the material. In an interview, she said that an artist’s work is a reflection of their inner self and that you “make things out of the structure of who you are”3. Her work is not representational or metaphorical, but instead focuses on the process of construction through repetitive action. In #2 Copper (1976) Winsor uses a simple grid to give structure to the minimal spheres of copper twine. Of her body of work, Dean Sobel says, “Each Winsor sculpture, in fact, has such a unique sense of dedication, concentration, and resolution”.3

1 http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Winsor_FourCorners.htm#
2 http://www.oxfordartonline.com/public/page/winsorinter
3 http://www.acastronovo.com/ClassHtms/ClassDocs/Winsor.pdf

Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan accumulates immense quantities of manufactured objects in large-scale systematic arrangements. She takes fishing wire, adding paper, Scotch tape, pencils, Styrofoam cups, drinking straws, and other commercial objects and transforms them into immense natural structures. By repeating unaltered simple objects, she does not purposefully disguise the materials, however, in such quantities the materials transcend their physical reality and become art . The specific materials dictate the form that is developed, and cause unique and awe-inspiring patterns. From a distance, Colony (2002) looks like a mossy growth on the gallery floor, however upon closer inspection you notice the intricacies of the thousands of different-sized standard, yellow #2 pencils. In her book published in 2008, Donovan says that the more you get, the more likely the piece will work, and that the scale makes all the difference . Each structure has a specific trait that is unique to the material, and in mass quantities the units mimic “the basic systems of growth found in nature” which causes her work to appear very organic and alive. Her series of cubes in 2001, however, do not mimic nature, but rather defy the laws of nature by being solely held together by friction and gravity. Untitled (Pins) is made from thousands of silver straight pins formed into a perfect cube. Although, the cube suggests Minimalism, instead of having an industrially created cube, Donovan created the cube by “pouring boxes upon boxes of pins into a four-sided mold. Once the sides are removed, the pins keep a cube shape, bound by nothing more than gravity.”3
Due to the delicacy and mass-production of her work, Donovan’s installations are site-responsive and must be rebuilt for each site. For instance, Untitled (2003), made from Styrofoam cups, is built from scratch every time. By using the incremental units, however, Donovan is able to create a cell-like structure that mimics topography and suggests the wonders of nature (such as cells, clouds, or even rolling hills). Nicholas Baume, the Institute of Contemporary Art’s chief curator, noted that Donovan’s work expands well beyond the rectilinear grids of the minimalists, and “has the pragmatic rigor of that earlier American period, but it brings it into our own period by suggesting digital, cellular, emergent networks. It seems to speak to the systems that are shaping our lives.”
Donovan’s process, like Jackie Winsor’s, is focused on repetitive action and labor. She spends hours experimenting until she accidentally discovers something that works. “So much about the art-making process is about paying attention,” says Donovan- “It’s about looking and noticing things”4. Through focusing on the repetition of her craft, Donovan is able to transform everyday, disposable materials into complicated, wondrous sculptures. Since her process is extremely labor intensive due to the larger-than-life scale of her work, Donovan has a team that helps her construct her installations. Part of her process is to create a complex yet understandable system using repeating incremental units so that her team can perform the repetitive action. In Moiré (1999), along with her assistants, she connected rolls and rolls of adding paper and rerolled them into really malleable forms. In doing so, the adding paper transformed into an “undulating shape whose surface appears to ripple”.4

1 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/stender/stender4-3-06_detail.asp?picnum=9
2 http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781580932134
3 http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/permanent-collection/artists/donovan/
4 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/arts/design/28kino.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

Untitled, 2003
Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue

Colony, 2002
Pencils, Glue

Moire,1999
Adding Machine Paper

2005
Installation View