This is part of an occasional series about objects that live in my studio.

This is actually a fish trap.  It’s not the best light now for it, but…  This was actually made for a proposal in Louisiana, for a government building.  I didn’t win the commission, but I started getting interested in fish traps as a way of bridging what I do with making it specific to that region.  So I started looking at all these fish traps, and this is just a standard thing that you can buy.  Basically, the fish swim in there and it’s too complicated for them to get out.  That’s the idea.  I bought the trap from some place in Louisiana.  It comes flat and you puff it out.  But it had a really sculptural form, really beautiful form, and so somehow I was trying to think about how I might do a bunch of these.

I spent a long time on it.  All of these threaded pieces–if there’s any density at all, they’re a long time.  That’s not really finished; it never really got to the critical density.  I just gave up on it, I think. 

But I still–I like it because it’s a body-looking shape.  It’s almost like a torso.  You almost think of a dress form or something. 

And just like the chicken wire–it’s malleable, it’s formable, but it has enough strength that it can take the tension of the little thread, to a point.  I haven’t really done too many of these ‘weaving space’ things in a long time.  I think if I pick it up again, these more organic things are what I would be interested in. 

studio