NYAB Event - Helen Mirra “Waulked”

Helen Mirra “Waulked”

Peter Freeman

This event has ended.

In her newest works, each titled Waulked Triangle, Mirra weaves with a continuous strand on a triangle loom. It is a slow and primitive method, and also physically engaging – the longest side of the triangle is seven feet, and the standing weaver moves from one edge to the other in alternately forming the warp and the weft. Mirra often intertwines the activity of walking with that of making art, and has in the past few years largely materialized work on foot, out-of-doors. Without walking being overtly involved in these new pieces (the waulking of the title is a term of Teutonic origin for the traditional hand-wrought process of finishing a weaving so that the fibers bind together), that activity remains at the root of all of her work; in as much as it is a way of thinking and seeing, it cultivates a somatic relationship with the world.

With a characteristic economy of means, and a deep engagement with the methods of making, Mirra transforms materials without unmooring them from their origins. For each weaving, Mirra uses wool from two different black sheep—rarities that are distinctive within white flocks, here they can barely be visibly determined one from another but for the delimiting colored strand drawn through each work. Three blacks appear - two from the individual sheep, one of their admixture. These are variations that reveal themselves gradually, beckoning extended regard. While each triangle is doubled over a cedar support, the simultaneity of the part and the whole unfolds. The mushroom-dyed border strand ties this work to other past works in which Mirra has explored boundaries and seams, including the slide projection Kestrel (1997), also on view. In this piece, a long sequence of black-and-white photographs of high tree tops is projected onto a small square of wall painted blue, so that the tree line dividing ground and sky disappears and reappears, revealing and supplanting the monochrome.