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ETHEREAL SCULPTURE
by Sue TaylorFiberarts, April-May, 2010
The heirloom-inspired creations of Linda Hutchins, rendered life-size in ghostly organza, speak to the fleeting nature of both making and memory.
In 2007, Linda Hutchins, commissioned by Portland's Oregon Ballet Theatre, created Memory of the Dance. Consisting of a pair of delicate ballet slippers suspended by lengths of satin rattail cord, the work exemplifies what's most impressive about Hutchins's practice: a perfect integration of form and content. The sheer, silvery white organza she chose for the shoes seems an ideal vehicle for this tribute to an ephemeral, time-based art form in which the viewer's experience of the performance morphs into memory, immediately and at every moment. White stitching that joins the soles and all the upper parts lends definition to these ghostly sculptural forms, which appear like drawings in space. Slightly misshapen by the tension of their seams, the slippers also suggest the imperfections of memory, which is never merely passively recorded but, like these ethereal shoes, is pieced together, imaginatively constructed.
Hutchins first employed organza in Jade Plant (2001), sheathing every leaf and branch of the potted succulent in a slipcover she painstakingly fashioned of the shimmering fabric. Uprooted and wall-mounted for exhibition, the plant shriveled inside its intricate custom nylon suit, lovingly protected yet ruthlessly abused. As an environmental statement, Jade Plant points to humanity's uneasy relationship with nature, alternately nurturing and destructive. On a more intimate level, the piece evokes the way objects in our care (children, mates, parents) sometimes elicit contradictory feelings, at once tender and hostile. The rich metaphorical possibilities are typical of Hutchins's approach, as is the labor-intensive process of making.
The artist further exploited the translucency of organza in a group of exquisite, almost weightless sculptures of humble objects (all 2008). Unlike Jade Plant, these fabric forms are empty, and indeed absence itself informs their meaning. The old hammerhead delineated in Hammer, Egg, Cup belonged to Hutchins's great-grandfather, while the baby cup is hers. The goblet and egg basket in her related work were her grandmother's. The ancestral associations and the repetitive reoccurrence of the egg in Eggs, Rope suggest a theme: generations and generation. Gendered references are clear. The phallic hammer invokes a masculine preserve of physical labor in bygone days, while the cup, goblet, and basket allude to the ancient trope of maternal body as vessel.
Rendering these quotidian items in the sheer, reflective organza and evacuating their material substance, Hutchins marshals light and air to present ideal Platonic forms, visually seductive and also poignant in their symbolic implications. If Eggs, Rope, with its five ovoids and two lopped lengths of rope, might alternatively be called "ova, umbilical cord," the empty Egg Basket becomes a touching feminine metaphor for loss. Still in progress is Cord (begun in 2008), an invented form coiling energetically in space, in contrast to the more static lengths in Eggs, Rope. Here the cord suggests a lively, binding continuity, cycles of growth, infinite potentiality. Open-ended, like life itself, Cord is among Hutchins's most ingenious works to date, not only for its disarming content and haunting formal beauty. As a cord, thread, fiber, or filament, it depicts the very material of its own making.
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