Ghost Pearls

October 12, 2022 – January 20, 2023

Granary Arts

Ephraim, UT

Ghost Pearls is an architectural sculpture that explores spaces of connection and mediation. The work is based on research into local and historical forms of lace-making, early digital art, and contemporary virtual space.

The sculpture is made from 1,005 pieces of rigid, individually cut mirror that are woven into an open, lace-like form, and suspended from the central beam of the gallery. As mirror, the work reflects both the viewer and surrounding architecture in an experiential play that raises questions of mediation and virtuality.

Ghost Pearls references lace in the collection of the Fairview Museum; conversations with local and regional lace-makers; historical links between lace, value, and time; the 1964 digital artwork Ninety Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly Increasing Period by A. Michael Noll; and works of the Light and Space movement.

Terrestrial photography was feeling a little dull, I’m into space pics now. (Brancusi is of course an exception, in everything he touched he channeled other worlds, continued study.) The heavenly bods are positively gravitational, it’s delicious to muse on such hunks. This class of image is close to what we see in digital art these days—infinite space, gradients, spheres. Yet digital images don’t often muster gravity and magnetism. In a way digital simulations have too much freedom, the constraints of physics generate power, learning from simplicity and scale.

Grateful to writer Raleigh Barrett and NoHoArts for this interview on Inverted Dome.

It’s a feel when a pallet of raw material arrives with a plonk, and just sits there, awaiting transformation into… something.

Back in 2014 when I was spooling up for A house made of air, a flatbed truck arrived one afternoon and dumped 55 sheets of 4’x8’ plywood off the back end. It landed with a ka-bam.

Richard Swayze, the artist-craftsman advising on the feasibility of the sculpture I had in mind standing up properly, looked at me like I was nuts. He cocked an eyebrow that asked, pointedly, do you really intend to rip an absolutely mental amount of ply into this multi-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle you’ve (somewhat vaguely) proposed? I did. He didn’t know me yet; there was an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it-Kristin vibe. I looked at me like I was nuts too. So it begins.

Wish I had a pic from that day. By the time of the above work-in-progress shot, the stomach-churning pile of ply (at left) had dwindled.

This one shouldn’t be so difficult, are my famous last words every time. But really, this one should be much easier….