Minneapolis
Nicole Havekost’s new drawings and sculptures demonstrate that, sometimes, complexity manifests most richly and strangely on the surface of things. Suturing, pricking, encrusting, sprinkling, saturating, slicing, waxing, burnishing, matting, and perforating are among the mark-making actions these works have sustained.
An upright, person-size sculpture occupied each of the rooms in “Penumbra,” Havekost’s recent solo exhibition. Lumpy bodies were covered in dark, skin-like surfaces that remained lambent, with a soft and silvery bloom, despite having been much sutured and scarred. Contours burgeoned within their hide envelopes, plumping forward and producing a potent impression of contents under pressure. Source and Gape were each sewn together from pieces of wool felt first saturated in beeswax, then burnished and dusted with drifts of soft pastel, oil pastel, salt, and graphite powder. The former, an upright cocoon-shaped torso, bears a double row of pink nipples along its pale and swelling belly. Gape’s spatulate form is vented by a top-to-bottom slit defined by gently swelling, salt-encrusted lips, equal parts geode and vagina. Havekost’s treatment of these surfaces enhances awareness of their permeability; they appear to be osmotic membranes that mediate intercourse between inside and outside, rather than erecting a barrier. If sutures highlight their potential to accommodate intrusion, the zones of delicate encrustation around nipples and lips give the impression of a crystallizing secretion, oozing from within.
The wall-mounted hemisphere Spine evoked an especially rich bevy of associations running the gamut of scale, from belly to shield to moon. In front of it, you experienced the retinal push/pull that occurs when figure and ground are shifting unstably, trading places before your eyes. Viewed frontally, the work’s surface could read as concave. When seen in high relief, from other vantage points, the same leathery surface suggested a convex plane bisected by a high vertebral ridge.
These new sculptures repurposed material from a prior body of work in which Havekost used wool felt to cover the surface of massive quadruped forms. “I reused some of the felt from the large figures, which I have been slowly taking apart,” she explained. “I started restitching those pieces of felt, fitting in new pieces as needed.” The process involved intensive manipulation. “I had to dip each piece (of wool felt) in the beeswax, lay it over, burnish the beeswax, and then stitch the pieces together. I use a curved needle for that, and I have a heat gun, so that I can heat things a little bit and make them easier to get through… Even though I’ve planned for the shape, once it goes in and out of the beeswax, I end up having to piece things together.”
Represented bodies that register simultaneously as humanoid and alien are the stuff of onscreen horror. Here, they evoked a different range of response. The delicate encrustation that accretes around the nipples in Source, or the precisely distributed hook-and-eye patterning along the flanks of the small sculpture Amble, elicited something more like tenderness. These surfaces come into being as a result of Havekost causing whole populations of micro gestures to aggregate over time, creating collective effects that resonate closely, in many cases, with naturally occurring ones. The painstaking, laborious nature of the process was evident, as was the cherishable nature of the resultant forms. Their patina was the residue of human touch.
This was equally true of the drawings, made on rag paper with graphite and soft pastel. Recurrent motifs connected to the experience of living in a female body include overlapping ovoid forms and triplicate holes. Some of these works involve graphite putty, including Spill in which a flowing silver form arcs away from the center of the plane into ambient space. In Overlay and Overlap, oval planes separate extremely textured zones from passages of mirror-smooth graphite, with oblong and hourglass shapes appearing compressed between paired arcs at the center. Both Three and Rondure are structured around a triad of large-bore holes that could be seen from across the room. Their surfaces, seemingly solid when viewed at a distance, proved on close inspection to be as insubstantial as nets or lace. Velvety tonal gradations were built up from scores of individual marks, each the result of a pinprick hole punched through the paper from behind. Every micro-puncture raised a snippet of the paper’s white backing above the picture plane, like a tiny flag, generating chiaroscuro effects when viewed collectively. In Slit, the eponymous motif was created through a mass accretion of these micro-punctures.
Havekost says that she generally has “both an idea, and a question” for what she wants to accomplish at the outset of a sculpture or drawing. With Slit, that question was: “How do I actually break through the paper, and what does that look like? What does that do to the paper? How can I make a gradient with the holes?” The process “has been about posing a question to myself and seeing how I can make the material answer that.”
For Havekost, the intricate stitching on her sculptures is a form of drawing in space. She expands on that perception with these multidimensional works, transposing innumerable stitches into the actual realm of draftsmanship. Viewers who confronted these works were hard pressed to sustain categorical distinctions in the face of their emphatic material presence. We’re accustomed to lines serving as dividers, facilitating the ability to draw distinctions—inside from outside, self from world, one species or medium from another. Havekost’s works memorably abetted all these forms of slippage, with their showers of sutures and precipitating tissues of holes.
