Peace is death - a fibersculpture for artexplosion and needleworkmonday

Peace is death
18 x 12 cm (mask) and 25 x 30 cm (knitting)
Clay, nails, knitted fabric


Peace is death, is standstill, is nothingness, is everything.
Peace is hurting, the loss is hurting, you are frightening me, everything is frightening me.
There is loss in every ancient stone, loss buried by the sea, by my pain, my sadness, life.
Someone is drowning right now
Someone is drowning right now
Peace is death, is the sea, the loss of pain, the loss of love, is death, is life.


I am living in a bubble…. My world is ok, I have water, food, a nice flat, a loving husband. Everything is ok. For me. It is hard to accept that there are people dying in the sea, drowning because we do not help them. Because they have no papers, or nobody thinks he is responsible for them, because someone believe they will be a burden, they could cost money??! I am so outraged about this. Words are failing me…




Again, I started with the idea of an ancient death mask. A mask which usually was made of beeswax, and because of this material is seldom conserved. But visualizing death and stillness was not enough for me. I wanted to lend the sculpture an ambiguity, to illustrate that in this death something is lost for everybody. That this death is happening with pain and will bring pain – therefore the nails – that with this death a whole person is lost: The love, the ideas, the shared moments, everything. I used the knitted fabric as a symbol for a life. I borrowed this concept from Norse, Greece and Roman mythology, were you can find the concept of three norns or moirai who represent and determine the destiny of humans. These goddesses are often pictured as spinning, weaving and cutting fabric, while the yarn may symbolise the personal life and the fabric the tapestry of events which occur throughout a lifetime or even in the world. Besides making knots, and with this I thought also knitting, was deemed a technique to work magic.
The nails I inserted not only to show individual pain and suffering, they also reminded me of the Christian crown of thorns, which can be interpreted as a taking a burden for others: someone drowning, suffering for me….
So, we have not only the hard and unmoving death mask with its iron nails, we also have the soft pink fabric, as a symbol of life, a symbol of our interconnectedness. The One death will hurt us all. The knitted fabric I used as a representation of the individual lifetime; a life started with a neat ribbing. A fabric which step by step loses its connection, which has wholes, and rips, and unravels as its nearing its end. But on this sadness, something new (flowery) is already growing, hope for other lives to be saved or opinions changed.




Process
The mask I made with self-drying clay. I worked the rough form of the head over a ball made from old newspapers to get the curvature right. Afterwards I added clay for the forehead, chin and lips and cut away clay to form the eyes. I wanted to work a face which could be perceived as female, without making something explicit womanly. I wanted the surface to stay rough, to show its suffering, perhaps the missing food, the sadness, the fear of death. At last I inserted nails (with there heads) of varying length into the forehead and the mouth.




The knitting I made from a fuzzy lace yarn. The beginning rows are made neatly and orderly in a rib stitch and while progressing I changed to stockinette in bigger and bigger needles.




Additionally, I dropped stitches and made extremely big yarnovers, to create a fabric which loses all its integrity and order. Into the lose fabric I crocheted forms which may be interpreted as petals and flowers. The last step was to connect these flowers by surface crochet. And naturally to make the photos :-D




This is my entry for @juliakponsford artexplosion contest with the theme ‘Mask’ and simultaneously this weeks #needleworkmonday post :-D
Thank you @juliakponsford and @crosheille for hosting, curating and for being a constant inpiration <3