Arachne

Work with the intangible and the emotional, references to memory and identity, and the use of thread as a physical vehicle for these inner territories are central to this piece, made in a single day using white wool and removable adhesive. The threads become symbols of anxiety, pain, time and identity.

The intricate paths of temporal layers around a piano — apparently delicate and still, yet taut and charged with emotional information — appear as strata within an energetic web woven in synchronous movement inside and outside the body.

This web of threads — paths of information, memory and emotion — has been tensioned until a balance is achieved between either side. The piano stool forms the visual axis, like a corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres to the viewer, opening a space that seems to invite sitting yet makes it impossible. The piano, its lid raised and with a clear space through which to approach it, addresses the viewer: to make it sound, they must cross the spider’s web, but they cannot sit without tearing away the threads.

The piano, historically a fixture in the drawing rooms of bourgeois families, became a fetish object or objet trouvé for movements such as Fluxus, which used it in unconventional ways to express conflict with, or rejection of, tradition at both social and musical levels.

In this work, I believe that emotional intensity, made visible through threads like tendrils of time, has allowed me to recognise the in-between space in which I find myself. The web invites me to wait beside it while time weaves within me a mended reality that opens new paths of possibility.