On the Cover: Shiho Kagabu, Lateral Thinking—I dream, I fry in the sky. The stars, the tears, do not flow, 2021. Aluminum, helium gas, aluminum-deposited film, ribbon, thread, and words, with performance by Shiho Kagabu. Photo: Hikaru Takano, © Shiho Kagabu, Courtesy the artist, Tama Art University, and KAYOKOYUKI.
Editor’s Letter:
In a captivating interview this issue, British sculptor Holly Hendry discusses her interest in the permeability of boundaries, especially those between people and machines. She views their interactions as “simple systems,” she says. Indeed, systems might be said to form the landscape in which all the artists in this issue work, each in their own very different way. For the American Mary Mattingly, as her interviewer, Jan Garden Castro, explains, the “self-sufficient sculptural systems” she creates allow her to examine “natural ecosystems.” Similarly, the Polish artist Nina Nowak also produces systemic works, be it “a system of mining tunnels as an imprint of a larger body developed over centuries by excavation” or any number of other pieces that explore objects and actions in specific contexts. Shiho Kagabu, who is Japanese, sets various disparate objects and fragments of objects in relation to one another, while London-based Nika Neelova excavates and repurposes such extant systems as water pipes and sedimentation. The underlying principle here is, of course, connection, and we are confident that, in reading about them you, too, will forge links with these artists. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
