Graduate Alumni > Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)

Eala O'Se (Spring 2016)
Eala O'Se (Spring 2016)
Yarn, cloth, clay, paper, plaster

Systems and labels seek to make complex unknowns into manageable understandings through grouping, splitting, morphing, and comparison. In my work I create forms that act as systems, drawing imagery from grids and shelving. The walls of these structures are not cut into perfect squares, but allowed to sag under their own weight in the building process. In this way the structures are unreliable and fail as organizational grids before the objects they divide are present. These objects are crocheted, woven, and sewn out of yarn and cloth into organic forms that hang loosely when they are laid out flat or hung on a wall. Positioned on the plaster structures they are split by the walls and forced to twist onto themselves in order to fit onto the narrow plaster sheets. Despite these forced changes the materiality of the cloth and yarn resists organization where strings fall off of the edges or tangle with each other rather than being folded or laid flat.

Through these sculptures I attempt to set up a language that I can use to explore the function of a system. I play on the structures’ failure to function properly as a way of creating order while continuing to function as tools of alteration and display by creating arrangements and installations that push this disconnect between failure and function.