String in contemporary art:

By a thread

String as contemporary art medium

String in contemporary art: 

Gabriel Dawe

 

Gabriel Dawe's brilliantly coloured string installations are stretched between loom-like frames and reference the domestic weaving of textiles undertaken by women in his native Mexico - a craft which, as a child, he was forbidden to explore due to its associations with femininity.

Consequently, Dawe's work takes on personal significance as a means of subverting the machismo expectations of his homeland, but is also

This resonance is often achieved by the superimposition of one stringed screen against another, not only intensifying colour, but creating a sense of conjoined form and depth.

 

 

Anne Lindberg

 

Anne Lindberg's sculptural string installations resemble clouds of powdered pigment shot through with hints of blended colour.

This interest in chromatic arrangements of coloured string is made even more explicit in Lindberg's 'thread drawings', which consist of lines of cord stretched from staples fixed directly to the wall.

Partially emulating the linen support on which paintings are made, as well as approximating their pigmented surfaces, Lindberg's beautifully modulated abstractions provide an interesting twist on the notion of drawing, painting and use of the line.

 

 

 

Kate Terry

 

By using a far less dense arrangement of thread than many of the other artists featured here, UK artist Kate Terry creates works that are particularly ethereal.

Elusive to the gaze, her arrangements are partially revealed by ambiental lighting, a ploy that not only implicates the viewer in an act of discovery, but underpins the volumetrically insubstantial nature of her chosen medium.

 

 

Julien Salaud

 

Traditional 'string art' takes an unexpected direction in French sculptor Julien Salaud's fusion of the form with taxidermy.

Studding stuffed animals with nails (he has a particular fondness for deer) before cocooning them in dense, geometric webbing, Salaud refers to the results as 'constellations' - especially apt when the works are lit with fluorescent light to define an intricate, cosmos-like arrangement of threads.

 

 

 

 

Kaoru Hirano

 

By picking apart items of used clothing, Japanese artist Kaoru Hirano creates works that are not only ghostly in appearance, but also serve as spectral embodiments of previous owners.

"You can take apart someone's clothes", Hirano has stated, "but there's a history that remains in the fibres."

 

Hong Sung Chul

 

For Korean artist Hong Sung Chul, string as a medium is deeply symbolic, reminiscent not only of the umbilical cord, but representative, too, of the various interactions that connect human beings .

Consequently, thread has featured throughout his career, appearing, for example, in early performances (documented as video) in which the artist appears to ingest noodle-like lengths of cord.

 

More recently, Hong Sung Chul has used elastic thread as a platform for photographic images of the human body.

Arranged in several tiers, the strings make up dense, ultimately fragmented images which shift in form and coherence according to the angle from which they are viewed.

And the particularly mutable properties of elastic itself - both retractive and expansive; flexible yet capable of tautness - are again seen as metaphorical for the ever-changing flux of social relations, adding formal complexities to the portraits with which the strings are imprinted.