Whatever I chose for time- and labor-intensive handwork has to make it easy for me to travel back and forth between materiality and meta-physicality.  Twine seems especially suited to evoking a bodily resonance.

Magdalena Abakonowicz | Abakan 27, 1967

Magdalena Abakanowicz describes it this way. “Handling fiber, we handle mystery … made with our hands, it is a record of our thoughts.”  She described the manila rope she used for weaving as “a petrified organism … touching it, I can learn its secrets and a multitude of meanings. I sense it’s strength, which is carried by all its intertwined elements, such as those in a tree, human hand or a bird’s wing.” (Source: Barbara Rose, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1994.)

Twine functions both viscerally and symbolically in referencing the body as landscape.  It speaks readily of nature’s cycles of birth, growth, death and decay.  To be fibrous is to be human! Our skin is fiber like our muscle, bone, nerves, veins, the threads of our hearts. Indeed, fibers intertwine as our genetic code. In this way, fibers symbolize for me a lifeline, representing a cyclical line of time—connecting our bodies to the body in which we all live: Earth.