Overview Rendition Tunnel Flags Egg Knots Fence
Knots
By the time I lost count, there were over 100,000 knots in this piece. It took a long time.
I began the knotting as a meditative practice, with the sole purpose of forcing myself to slow down and enter a contemplative state. I considered the knotted rope to be a documentation of my time spent doing this. As I was knotting and thinking, however, I began to make different associations. Surely, the knots were a metaphor for the passing of time, but they were also about patience. The jute cord that I was using was very earth-related both in color and material. I began to think of my growing collection of knotted ropes as a population of people. Somewhere around this time, maybe during one of the seemingly never ending Arab/Israeli conflicts, I noticed that all the Arabic flags had the same color scheme. I researched this and found that there is indeed a Pan Arab set of colors, Red, White, Green, and Black, all with symbolic associations that were sympathetic to my feelings for "my population." I searched for these colors in a string-like material and found "Peace Fleece" a natural dyed yarn that had fully saturated versions of the Pan Arab colors (fully saturated non-synthetic green yarn is actually rare). The fact that people form formerly Eastern Bloc countries made and exported these yarns further added to the underlying meaning that was developing around this piece.
At a certain point, I decided to gather these knotted ropes together. I chose to arrange them in a circular arrangement as a reference to the Native American sacred circle. I hung them so that they cascaded down the wall and spilled out onto the floor. Water, time passage, temporality, a patience that lasts generations. I wove all these aspects and others into this piece.
So, this piece full of references and internal meanings, only some of which I have mentioned here that are completely opaque to the viewer. I chose not to present these inner meanings as part of the piece, but cannot identify a strong reason for why I made this decision. Maybe I wanted people to make their own associations, or to revel in the physical textures and form without the associations I had made. Maybe, I wanted to keep these for myself, my own private treasure.