There’s a place on my back that isn’t there, 2005
nylon stretch cord, steel cables, plywood and steel mounting structure: 126 x 60 x 84 in / 315 x 150 x 210 cm

Elastic cord is woven between steel cables, creating a space large enough for a person to enter and be supported, leaning into the webbed threads. The cables trace a “constellation” of skin on the artist’s back. [See Out here in space, 2005.]

connective tissue, Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montréal (2005)
Search for Parallax (based on a constellation related to gallery site), Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto (2008)
Photos: Richard-Max Tremblay; Video: the artist

I started these things a while after my mom died, as a way to try to get my body to understand how she could be there and then… not be. I took my cue from the tenacious spiders whose wispy threads disturb one’s presumption of emptiness. Theirs is the work of periphery, where everything comes out of obscurity and returns to it.

The two sculptures articulate areas circling from my outstretched arms. Threads are built up in accumulative weaving systems (my attempt at spider technique) which tenaciously draw human-scale spaces from an imprecise, gestural geometry. The webbed structures are the result of kilometres of thread massed in an area within arms’ length. In one, I looped a continuous, nearly invisible thread in and out of itself to form a column of light; in the other I criss-crossed elastic cord in a skin-based constellation pattern to form an elastic core of pressing darkness. Tension holds everything together, making architecture out of otherwise unsupportable flimsiness.

Alongside these sculptures were two sets of drawings: on vellum, figures only visible by the shapes of inked lines clouding them; on transparent polyester massed circles painstakingly scratched, subtly distorting the smooth, reflective surfaces, the reflection a thing in itself.