Friday 15 May 2009

Nest





Materials: pair of girls' shoes, ribbon
Dimensions: variable

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

These really are intriguing and so dramatic. The images put me in mind of ballet shoes with there strictures of lacing. Freedom, constricted. Good to see you again!

RosieK said...

Beautiful and poetic Marjojo - thank you for your art!

redredday said...

oooh Marjojo. happy to see a new post sooner than i thought! and glad to hear that you've been taking in your lovely rosebush. :). thanks also to your connection to a small red sun of my spring print. it is that and a small beating heart.

and your shoe ribbon nest...i think the pictures do not quite convey them well. it feels very detached and remote to me the way you have it here. is that an intent? i imagine if i were standing in the room seeing the nest ribbon at my feet and then following the lines of ribbon high high up, i would be struck - jarred - that they came from a pair of red shoes. why?? how strange. a little red girl comes to mind and i'm thinking where is she? has she gone and is this that is left of her? or is this how it is for her - forever tied down and not existing elsewhere? or does she even exist?? i wonder...

Marjojo said...

Mien, the photos aren't very good, but maybe there is something in what you say anyway. The distance between the shoes and the floor/nest was less than a meter, so even when you follow the ribbon up from the nest you'll still be looking down on the shoes, which I think makes more sense. The ribbon flows directly from the bow, makes the bow actually and then flows. I don't like bows, esp. not on shoes, they seem to say so muxh about girls not being allowed to play and get dirty, about having to be quiet and nice and restrained. Wanted to play with that, loosen it up a bit and see what else comes up. Apart from the obvious what I found and didn't expect (in the photographgs) was that it looked like the girl was standing on a kind of brink, maybe wondering/maybe fearful - should she jump or step back? What would she find down there? Would she be different? Something drawing her down, in ambiguous ways too.

Roxana said...

the more i get to see of your works, the more i find there is something deeply unsettling about them - "intriguing", "dramatic", "strange", "poetic" - all words coming up in the comments, i think not one of us can escape this feeling - because it is not just 'poetic', it is something gripping, very powerful, which doesn't want to leave us anymore and prevents us to go back to our habitual way of seeing the world. which is indeed exactly what art should do, i found this quote on mansuetude's blog and it immediately came to my mind here, because i think it applies to every work of art, not just books:

“I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” (Kafka)