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JANINE ANTONI:[br]A rope is an umbilical cord, you know.

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It’s something that connects two things.

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Which sort of is what Moor is about.

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It’s about all these people being, you know,

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my life sort of connecting all these people.

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The idea was to take all these [br]very different materials,

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but also lives,

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and sort of bring them together through

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the rope making process.

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My mother’s fall I put in there.

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And then my friend Pat made [br]this piece with hammocks,

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so that’s what this is.

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Another friend’s piece, Doug,

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this is his Hi8 tape that we took apart.

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And this is sort of my favorite section;

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this is the section of the grandmothers.

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This red dress is my father’s [br]mother’s Christmas dress…

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I wonder whether the viewer can in some way

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uncover these stories through [br]their experience of the object,

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whether these stories are [br]somehow held in the material.

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Melissa: With a lot of the material what [br]was done is they were cut up into strips

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or say if it was an electrical [br]cord it was taken apart

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and all the wires inside were taken apart,

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and then twisted together with [br]other materials to create a rope.

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Since I was a little girl, my mother [br]and I would make things together,

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actually the whole family [br]would make things together.

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And I love the handmade in any form it takes.

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There’s so many objects that [br]we come into contact with

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that we’ve lost a connection [br]to what they’re made of,

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who made them.

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So that’s really important for [br]me to sort of, in the object,

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on the surface of the object,

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somehow give you a history of how that [br]object’s made its way into the world.

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To make this piece what I did is [br]I dipped myself in a tub of lard.

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The piece is called Eureka and it was [br]inspired by the story of Archimedes.

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And Archimedes was asked by the [br]king how much gold was in his crown

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and he was killing himself [br]how can he measure capacity?

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Well he’s in the bathtub one night

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and he realizes that his body is [br]displacing the water in the tub.

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He gets very excited, jumps [br]out and screams “Eureka.”

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It seems to me that Archimedes’s [br]body was the tool for the experiment,

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just as my body is the tool for making.

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But most importantly is this idea [br]that he came to this knowledge

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through the experience of his body.

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And that’s why I do these kind [br]of extreme acts with my body.

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I feel that the viewer has a body too and

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can empathize with what I’ve put [br]myself through to make the artwork.

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To me so much meaning is in how [br]we choose to make something,

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both in art but in all objects [br]that we deal with in our lives.

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I kind of think of the work as like the [br]viewer is coming in on the scene of a crime.

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And I’ve left all these clues for them to uncover.

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I did this show and the exhibition [br]space was connected to a dairy farm.

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So right away I said can you [br]give me a tour of the barns.

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And I noticed that troughs are made out of tubs.

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I thought what if I take a bath, [br]will the cow continue to drink,

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thinking that you know I’ve [br]drunk from the cow my whole life

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and I could sort of create this relationship.

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Well cows are very curious, they all came,

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started drinking, and it almost [br]reversed the whole relationship.

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She looks like she’s nursing from me.

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And the title of the piece is [br]2038 which is the tag in the ear,

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and the reason I chose that is I felt that [br]that epitomized our relationship to the cow,

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that it was almost like a [br]hardly an animal anymore,

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but a biological machine and I wanted that to contrast the kind of tenderness of the image.

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I was really thinking about um the Virgin Mary

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and these images we know of her.

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Like the Virgin Mary is not [br]allowed to do anything physical.

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No sex, she doesn’t get to die.

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The only thing she’s allowed to do is nurse.

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And I was thinking about how does that [br]image affect my ideas of motherhood

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and that sort of idyllic moment [br]that we know from those paintings

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but also from Pampers ads of mother and child.

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What you’re looking at is a bucket [br]from a construction tractor.

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It was twice the size and I [br]got the bucket cut in half.

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Then I melted it down and I [br]created all these forms inside.

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Cradle is a piece which is mainly [br]about these things cradling each other,

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you know it ends with a looped spoon,

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which is like when a child is [br]first becoming independent,

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first can feed itself and then,

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it’s about that need we never lose to be held.

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All the cow pieces were an [br]effort to relate to the cow -

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to understand it and to [br]understand my relationship to it.

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And so for me to get on my hands and knees is

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really to imitate the animal in some way.

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But also it’s clearly a submissive pose.

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This work is made out of rawhide.

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I made a mold of myself on my hands and knees.

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And then I took the rawhide [br]when it was very malleable

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and I draped it over the mold.

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I worked with all the folds, sculpting them,

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to depict the body underneath the veil.

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Then when the hide was completely hard,

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I removed the mold from the inside.

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So actually she’s totally hollow inside,

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and that’s really important because [br]I really want the viewer to feel

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both the absence of me and the absence of the cow.

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I thought that it was really interesting [br]that soap was made out of lard,

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that we’re cleaning the body with the body.

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It seemed quite curious to me.

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So I had this idea that I would make a [br]replica of myself in chocolate and in soap,

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and I would feed myself with myself by licking the chocolate and wash myself with myself.

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Both the licking and the bathing [br]are quite gentle and loving acts,

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but I’m slowly erasing myself.

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For me it’s about that conflict,

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that kind of love/hate relationship [br]we have with our physical appearance.

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And really like, the problem I have [br]with looking in the mirror and thinking,

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is that who I am?

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As I was making the rope,

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I thought it would be really [br]nice to walk on this rope.

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So I was thinking of the [br]rope as a kind of lifeline,

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you know the story of my life.

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So I thought wow, if I could walk on [br]it that would really be beautiful.

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So it was sort of making the rope that made [br]me come to the idea to learn to tightrope.

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I practiced tightroping for about an hour a day

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and after about a week I started to [br]feel like I’m now getting my balance.

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I started to notice that it wasn’t [br]that I was getting more balanced,

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but that I was getting more [br]comfortable with being out of balance.

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Rather than getting nervous and overcompensating,

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I could just compensate enough.

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And I thought I wish I could do that in my life.

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After going down many different avenues,

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I decided to make this work TOUCH.

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And what I did is I went home to the Bahamas,

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to the beach that was directly in [br]front of the house that I grew up in.

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It made sense for me to go back to this [br]horizon I had looked at my whole life.

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I thought it would have much more [br]tension if I could walk along the rope

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and as it dipped that just for a [br]moment I would touch the horizon.

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And so at a certain point, [br]after making the video TOUCH,

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and sort of living my fantasy of [br]walking on air, walking on the horizon,

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I thought, I really need to [br]do a piece about falling.

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And I went back to this idea that I [br]wanted to make the rope to walk on.

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We found a guy at Mystic Seaport [br]and he gave us a personal tour

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and showed us this quite [br]beautiful rope-making machine.

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And when we saw that machine [br]then we got the idea, you know,

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to make our own mini version of it.

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Making the rope brought me [br]to learning how to spin.

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Where with MOOR we are using everyday materials,

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now we’re using the most [br]traditional material, which is hemp.

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On a material level, I’m going back to the source,

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but also those crafts are sort of the beginning.

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I think that this, taking [br]on this women’s tradition,

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is also not a small thing.

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You have to put the right [br]amount of energy into the twist.

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Too much energy makes the rope weak,

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and too little energy makes the rope weak.

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So, the correlation that I see with [br]learning to walk on the tightwire,

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the looser I was the easier it was to balance.

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I’m not sure what this sculpture [br]I’m making, with the hemp,

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and, and the tightrope will be exactly,

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but it will be about the fall.

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It will, it will be about the [br]impossibility of that illusion.