My project last year involved using string and rope, and rope was the predominant material for a piece of work that I exhibited in the SNIP exhibition at Snape maltings alongside the SNAP art show at the Aldeburgh festival. That was the first time that rope played a large part in my work, and I found it to be a wonderful material to work with.
Rope is a very pliable material to use, especially in contrast to the other materials involved like wood and concrete, and is something that I would like to incorporate into my work now.
Robert Morris and his ‘anti-form’ work uses a lot of rope, and he also uses rope in combination with other materials to create interesting pieces such as his 1963 Untitled (Knots) piece. Morris’s anti-form is a notion towards process art and a focus on producing work, similar to my own intentions. Morris also strayed away from form in his work, often using geometric or symmetrical shapes (like a lot of minimalist artists) in order to remove any notion of form. Especially in his rope pieces, in my opinion, this gives focus directly to the materials used.
I definitely think that my own work in part relates to Morris’s work. At least visually the material combinations and the organising of the parts in such a way feel as though Morris and I enjoy the same aspects of making the work. His notion of anti-form is also something that I have always agreed with. Never have I made a piece of work based around the figure, and I guess that on some level I have always known this to be my preference but it is only in the last three years that I have begun to focus on deliberately avoiding it. Like Morris, I intend to make work based on material, building a piece of work that has a focus on its parts.
