The materials I use have been interesting path.  I started with fiber–I actually started with sewing thread, just doing small pieces.  And then the pieces got bigger and I experimented with different kinds of fiber at bigger scales, rope, cord, and other stuff. 

I did quite a bit of research into fiber because at the time I was trying to find the most suitable material for the outdoors. So it had to be the right combination of color, availability, size, strength, affordability… and that’s kind of a tricky equation.  It’s trickier than you might think because for what exists out there, they’re kind of all contradictory qualities. For instance, ideally I’d want to go out and get colored rope. It’s big, so you can make big sculptures and see it, and it’s fade-resistant, and it’s abrasion resistant, and it’s affordable.  But different industries demand certain things for certain ropes. So for instance, if you went to buy a colored rope, you’ll have trouble finding very many colors in rope. That’s because if you went to, say, the sailing industry where there’s a lot of rope, there’s more of an interest in how that rope will perform structurally, how it will hold up to saltwater over time.  They don’t care so much about color. So it becomes very expensive for the wrong reasons. I don’t need that kind of structure. So you go to another industry and you find, say, parachute cord–that comes in a lot of colors, but it doesn’t hold up to outdoor UV. I found that there was something missing at all the points.

So at some point I said, okay, if there’s no ready-made solution out there, then I need to really zero in on the material, the yarn that makes up the rope, and then figure out a way to make my own rope.  So I did that, and I’ve worked with a couple different materials to create a custom rope. So for instance, there are outdoor fabrics that come in colors, say for furniture or marine type applications, where color is desirable. So colors are made to stand up to the elements for a pretty long period. But they’re not in rope form; they’re in fabric form. So then it required me making connections with the companies–not ones that would distribute the fabric but ones that actually spun the yarn, and developing a relationship with them to purchase the yarn, and then taking it somewhere where they make rope out of anything and going that route.  So it’s interesting. Of course, I would always prefer to choose a ready-made solution because it’s already out there. If you can adapt it, then you’re good. But sometimes you have dig further and I don’t like reinventing things because it’s costly. And you don’t know how it’s going to perform.

The advantage to using something that’s known is that it has a track record, and you can also then come to somebody and say, you know, this material generally will perform this way.  I remember an early case when that happened–I proposed using this colored fiber, having it braided into rope, and then doing the piece. And I had already got the commission, it was in New Mexico, it was a small suspended piece outdoors, and everybody was excited.  And then at the last minute, the selection committee started to get cold feet about using fiber. They were concerned that it wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t going to be a long term solution. So I had to then prove to them somehow that it would work.  But this is custom-made stuff, so there’s no real track record. I decided that the best I could do was to submit analyses of this yarn as used in a fabric application, and say, this is how it performs as a fabric. I could show them samples that have been out in the elements for ten years and say that I don’t know, I can’t predict how this is going to perform as a rope, but we have a pretty good indication that it’s going to be like this.  

In the end, I convinced them not just that it was a viable thing–that it wasn’t going to fail in two years–but honestly that it would fail at some point, right?  The colors would fade too much, or it might start breaking down. But then weighing that against the artistic benefit to using fiber–so for instance, we could have scrapped the fiber altogether and said let’s use steel and paint little colored steel things–yet, it took the art in a wrong direction.  It was not the same thing. There’s an artistic aspect that needs to be weighed in. The benefit was too great, the experience, the art… and so that has to be a decision too.  That’s a whole realm–it’s all really been an education.

materials, woven olla