collaborative work
The seed of this artmaking venture stems from a friendship that has lasted over twenty years and several moves to new cities and states. Although we have never collaborated as artists, the familiarity and almost familial ties that formed over such a long time enabled an ease and almost psychical understanding shared by each of us during our collaboration. Neither of us is good at keeping in touch with the other, and yet, we have managed to stay friends. As the pandemic took hold of the United States, it made both us long for simpler times we shared in our youth. This artwork and ongoing collaborative artmaking venture is perhaps our way of attempting to (re)connect with each other in a time when physical connections are discouraged. Through this collaboration, we (Marcy and Ramya) got to know each other again as matured, self-assured women and artists.
In this project we brought our individual lines of inquiry together to enact an artwork that used the materiality of our existing artmaking practices and forged them together to bring about an odd, ritual-like performance and resulting sculptural form. Marcy sent a mohair object to Ramya. Then Ramya took the mohair object and put hundreds of chrysanthemum flowers in it as an invented ritual, loosely drawing on Hindu religious rituals, to meditate on and create a new ritual that draws on cross-cultural symbology of the chrysanthemum as a healing, youth elixir. Perhaps in a way to put into the world our hope for healing and renewal in a post-pandemic world.
The video capturing the performance of this act is a bit melancholy and weird. The flowers disappear into the knitted object like a netted snake devouring flowers. Making sense of this strange and unfamiliar action would be a moment rife for the creation of mythology to explain the strangeness of the video. It is a repetitive and meditative invented ritual that keeps becoming made as the video loops, taking on the symbolism of an ourobouros.
Overall the work, its weirdness, the difficulty we both had parsing the video, sculpture, and performance mimics how we felt during the pandemic. Facing the unfamiliar, reaching for the familiar, searching for solutions, creating moments of weirdness through sheer necessity.
In this project we brought our individual lines of inquiry together to enact an artwork that used the materiality of our existing artmaking practices and forged them together to bring about an odd, ritual-like performance and resulting sculptural form. Marcy sent a mohair object to Ramya. Then Ramya took the mohair object and put hundreds of chrysanthemum flowers in it as an invented ritual, loosely drawing on Hindu religious rituals, to meditate on and create a new ritual that draws on cross-cultural symbology of the chrysanthemum as a healing, youth elixir. Perhaps in a way to put into the world our hope for healing and renewal in a post-pandemic world.
The video capturing the performance of this act is a bit melancholy and weird. The flowers disappear into the knitted object like a netted snake devouring flowers. Making sense of this strange and unfamiliar action would be a moment rife for the creation of mythology to explain the strangeness of the video. It is a repetitive and meditative invented ritual that keeps becoming made as the video loops, taking on the symbolism of an ourobouros.
Overall the work, its weirdness, the difficulty we both had parsing the video, sculpture, and performance mimics how we felt during the pandemic. Facing the unfamiliar, reaching for the familiar, searching for solutions, creating moments of weirdness through sheer necessity.
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Chrysanthemum performance, video, 2021