Weaving Together Life's Debris

It's been said, one person's trash is another's treasure.That's certainly the case with Nancy Kyes, who takes the debris of life and weaves it together to create her sculptures. Motherhood, and all the messiness and disorder of child rearing, was the catalyst of her quest to understand chaos. Ultimately, she decided to utilize the so-called trash of life, "domestic detritus" as she calls it, as the materials for her work. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of disconnected and unrelated pieces are combined to create familiar objects. She uses no glue or paint in her construction. Her pieces are held together with an intricate weaving process.

The sculpture above, titled "More Perfect Union." was built in early 2009 in honor of Obama's presidential election. She describes the piece as "a remake of the nation's flag to more fully reflect the cultural reach of the USA. At the same time the work also takes on the appearance of an axe. This has something to do with the shape of the tree branch attached to the undulating flag part of the work. The branch could be a very crooked flag pole or the normal shape of the wooden handle of an axe, the kind Abraham Lincoln famously used to split rails." The piece is more about questions than answers. "I'm cultivating all sorts of questions here about who and where we are as a nation state at his time," Kyes says.Some of her pieces are collaborative works with fellow artist Joyce Kohl. (In the photo above, Kyes is on the left, Kohl on the right.) Their first freestanding effort is a piece titled, "Boat." Kyes says it was inspired by the limitless possibilities, materials, offered in life. "How we choose to engage with possibilities largely determines the shape of our indidvidual and collective lives," she says. The piece is the first phase of a two phase work, with the second phase more fully developing the theme. The second piece will use the same materials, process and scale, and be a "cage-like form suspended from the ceiling, to suggest an altogether different state of mind."

The work of Nancy Kyes and Joyce Kohl is currently on display at LA ArtCore, 650A South Avenue 21, just west of the Main Street exit off the Golden State Freeway.