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Unraveling
Unraveling
Unraveling at the Sarasota Art Museum presents collaborative works with Terrol Dew Johnson, Tohono O’odham artist, educator, and activist. The show features their largest piece, commissioned by Art in Embassies for permanent installation in the U.S. Embassy in Asunción, Paraguay. Where the Clouds Live is a tall, suspended sculpture of steel elements and paper panels made from plants of the Sonoran Desert and Asunción.
location
Sarasota Art Museum
year
2021
collaborators
Terrol Dew Johnson
Sarasota Art Museum
Photo: Ryan Gamma
In the baskets of the Tohono O’odham people, ritualistic making is embodied by the coil. The act of coiling begins with a central point around which a material is wound, spiraling outward and upward in concentric circles to create a structural surface. Coiling generates form through pattern–an algorithm–building on a set of principles that can be manipulated to generate shape.
Sarasota Art Museum
Photo: Ryan Gamma
Sarasota Art Museum
Photo: Ryan Gamma
Coiling is a structural strategy for producing functional objects, but it is also a ritual for connecting the weaver to their history, community, and environment. Ritual material culture and everyday utilitarian culture are inseparable.
Where the Clouds Live, Sarasota Art Museum Photo: Aranda\Lasch
Through the making of everyday objects, people reiterate the foundational values of their society. The gathering, preparation, and manipulation of natural materials into a basket guides the weaver toward understanding the world around them and their place within it. As with the O’odham peoples, cosmology is expressed through the very language of basketry. Coiling coalesces the material, spiritual, aesthetic worlds.
This thousand-year-old weaving ritual became the artists’ shared language. Honoring the ancestral heritage of the Tohono O’odham Nation, the sculptures implement natural materials endemic to the Sonoran Desert, such beargrass and yucca, contrasted by manufactured elements, including copper and steel wire. What emanates through these indigenous materials are ethereal abstract forms that unite nature and technology and tradition and transformation.
Recognition
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