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JANINE ANTONI: 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, my life sort of connecting

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all these people. The idea was to take all
these very different materials,

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but also lives, and sort of bring them

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together through 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 this piece
with hammocks,

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so that's what this is.

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Another friends' 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 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 their 
experience of the object,

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whether these stories are somehow held
in the material.

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

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or say if it was an electrical 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 other 
materials to create a rope.

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

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actually the whole family 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 we come into 
contact with

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that we've lost a connection to what 
they're made of,

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who made them.

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So that's really important for me to sort 
of, in the object, on the

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surface of the object, somehow give 
you a history

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of how that object's made its way into the
world.

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

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

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And Archimedes was asked by the kind how 
much gold was in his crown and he

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was killing himself 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 
displacing the water in the tub.

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He gets very excited, jumps out and 
screams "Eureka."

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It seems to me that Archimedes's 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 that he 
came to this knowledge through

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the experience of his body.

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And that's why I do these kind of extreme 
acts with my body.

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I feel that the viewer has a body too and 
can empathize with what I've put

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myself through to make the artwork.

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

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

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I kind of think of the work as like the 
viewer is coming in on the scene of a

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

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

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So right away I said can you 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, will 
the cow continue to drink,

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thinking that you know I've 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 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 2038 which
is the tag in the ear,

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and the reason I chose that is I felt that
that epitomized our relationship to the

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cow, that it was almost like a hardly 
an animal anymore,

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

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the image. I was really thinking about um 
the Virgin Mary and these images

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we know of her.

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Like the Virgin Mary is not 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 
image affect my ideas of motherhood

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and that sort of idyllic moment that we 
know from those paintings

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but also from Pampers ads of mother and 
child.