JANINE ANTONI: A rope is an umbilical cord, you know.
It’s something that connects two things.
Which sort of is what Moor is about.
It’s about all these people being, you know,
my life sort of connecting all these people.
The idea was to take all these very different materials,
but also lives,
and sort of bring them together through
the rope making process.
My mother’s fall I put in there.
And then my friend Pat made this piece with hammocks,
so that’s what this is.
Another friend’s piece, Doug,
this is his Hi8 tape that we took apart.
And this is sort of my favorite section;
this is the section of the grandmothers.
This red dress is my father’s mother’s Christmas dress…
I wonder whether the viewer can in some way
uncover these stories through their experience of the object,
whether these stories are somehow held in the material.
Melissa: With a lot of the material what was done is they were cut up into strips
or say if it was an electrical cord it was taken apart
and all the wires inside were taken apart,
and then twisted together with other materials to create a rope.
Since I was a little girl, my mother and I would make things together,
actually the whole family would make things together.
And I love the handmade in any form it takes.
There’s so many objects that we come into contact with
that we’ve lost a connection to what they’re made of,
who made them.
So that’s really important for me to sort of, in the object,
on the surface of the object,
somehow give you a history of how that object’s made its way into the world.
To make this piece what I did is I dipped myself in a tub of lard.
The piece is called Eureka and it was inspired by the story of Archimedes.
And Archimedes was asked by the king how much gold was in his crown
and he was killing himself how can he measure capacity?
Well he’s in the bathtub one night
and he realizes that his body is displacing the water in the tub.
He gets very excited, jumps out and screams “Eureka.”
It seems to me that Archimedes’s body was the tool for the experiment,
just as my body is the tool for making.
But most importantly is this idea that he came to this knowledge
through the experience of his body.
And that’s why I do these kind of extreme acts with my body.
I feel that the viewer has a body too and
can empathize with what I’ve put myself through to make the artwork.
To me so much meaning is in how we choose to make something,
both in art but in all objects that we deal with in our lives.
I kind of think of the work as like the viewer is coming in on the scene of a crime.
And I’ve left all these clues for them to uncover.
I did this show and the exhibition space was connected to a dairy farm.
So right away I said can you give me a tour of the barns.
And I noticed that troughs are made out of tubs.
I thought what if I take a bath, will the cow continue to drink,
thinking that you know I’ve drunk from the cow my whole life
and I could sort of create this relationship.
Well cows are very curious, they all came,
started drinking, and it almost reversed the whole relationship.
She looks like she’s nursing from me.
And the title of the piece is 2038 which is the tag in the ear,
and the reason I chose that is I felt that that epitomized our relationship to the cow,
that it was almost like a hardly an animal anymore,
but a biological machine and I wanted that to contrast the kind of tenderness of the image.
I was really thinking about um the Virgin Mary
and these images we know of her.
Like the Virgin Mary is not allowed to do anything physical.
No sex, she doesn’t get to die.
The only thing she’s allowed to do is nurse.
And I was thinking about how does that image affect my ideas of motherhood
and that sort of idyllic moment that we know from those paintings
but also from Pampers ads of mother and child.
What you’re looking at is a bucket from a construction tractor.
It was twice the size and I got the bucket cut in half.
Then I melted it down and I created all these forms inside.
Cradle is a piece which is mainly about these things cradling each other,
you know it ends with a looped spoon,
which is like when a child is first becoming independent,
first can feed itself and then,
it’s about that need we never lose to be held.
All the cow pieces were an effort to relate to the cow -
to understand it and to understand my relationship to it.
And so for me to get on my hands and knees is
really to imitate the animal in some way.
But also it’s clearly a submissive pose.
This work is made out of rawhide.
I made a mold of myself on my hands and knees.
And then I took the rawhide when it was very malleable
and I draped it over the mold.
I worked with all the folds, sculpting them,
to depict the body underneath the veil.
Then when the hide was completely hard,
I removed the mold from the inside.
So actually she’s totally hollow inside,
and that’s really important because I really want the viewer to feel
both the absence of me and the absence of the cow.
I thought that it was really interesting that soap was made out of lard,
that we’re cleaning the body with the body.
It seemed quite curious to me.
So I had this idea that I would make a replica of myself in chocolate and in soap,
and I would feed myself with myself by licking the chocolate and wash myself with myself.
Both the licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts,
but I’m slowly erasing myself.
For me it’s about that conflict,
that kind of love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance.
And really like, the problem I have with looking in the mirror and thinking,
is that who I am?
As I was making the rope,
I thought it would be really nice to walk on this rope.
So I was thinking of the rope as a kind of lifeline,
you know the story of my life.
So I thought wow, if I could walk on it that would really be beautiful.
So it was sort of making the rope that made me come to the idea to learn to tightrope.
I practiced tightroping for about an hour a day
and after about a week I started to feel like I’m now getting my balance.
I started to notice that it wasn’t that I was getting more balanced,
but that I was getting more comfortable with being out of balance.
Rather than getting nervous and overcompensating,
I could just compensate enough.
And I thought I wish I could do that in my life.
After going down many different avenues,
I decided to make this work TOUCH.
And what I did is I went home to the Bahamas,
to the beach that was directly in front of the house that I grew up in.
It made sense for me to go back to this horizon I had looked at my whole life.
I thought it would have much more tension if I could walk along the rope
and as it dipped that just for a moment I would touch the horizon.
And so at a certain point, after making the video TOUCH,
and sort of living my fantasy of walking on air, walking on the horizon,
I thought, I really need to do a piece about falling.
And I went back to this idea that I wanted to make the rope to walk on.
We found a guy at Mystic Seaport and he gave us a personal tour
and showed us this quite beautiful rope-making machine.
And when we saw that machine then we got the idea, you know,
to make our own mini version of it.
Making the rope brought me to learning how to spin.
Where with MOOR we are using everyday materials,
now we’re using the most traditional material, which is hemp.
On a material level, I’m going back to the source,
but also those crafts are sort of the beginning.
I think that this, taking on this women’s tradition,
is also not a small thing.
You have to put the right amount of energy into the twist.
Too much energy makes the rope weak,
and too little energy makes the rope weak.
So, the correlation that I see with learning to walk on the tightwire,
the looser I was the easier it was to balance.
I’m not sure what this sculpture I’m making, with the hemp,
and, and the tightrope will be exactly,
but it will be about the fall.
It will, it will be about the impossibility of that illusion.