Santa Fe, New Mexico
Before we learned to write, we learned to speak. Before it was a language recognized by our tribe, it was sound. Our cries of pleasure and pain were connected to what we experienced in our bodies, and as we quickly learned, those sounds could elicit attention and care. As we began to move through space our perceptions grew, living in a membrane of sensory discovery that enveloped input from eyes, hands, ears, and skin. Before our experiences had language, they were felt space. Jane Lackey returns us to the epiphanies of felt space and the impulse to bridge experience with language. Her recent site-specific installation, Enveloping Space: Walk, Trace, Think, established a liminal entrance space through 500 weighted, hanging cords. Visually suggestive of a stringed piano board, moving gently with currents of air, these cords slowed the viewer to a pace appropriate to attentive detail and refined material messaging. The wooden weights clicked softly against each other as they referenced the material structure of the space, echoing a timber grid set into the poured concrete floor. …see the entire review in the print version of September’s Sculpture magazine.
