Threadwrapped

In response to "impossible red" by Anne Lindberg

I can never say everything I thought. I can’t ever express all the things I felt, each ray that hit and played across my eyes. That sometimes it hurt, but in the sparkling way that kept my eyes open. 

This piece is about movement and stillness. The strings firmly anchored to the wall and pulled taught. But as I move the colors shift and dance. We don’t see light move, but it travels. Stepping back and forth, rising and falling in some kind of waltz, the effect and I move together in contrasting unison. 

There is a pull between us. Each string has reached for me, reached through the center of my eye and attached. At each attempt to describe the incandescent play of light and color the threads wrap themselves around my tongue, red purple green to make red, and stop me. I am subdued. I submit. 

In my daydreams I am wrapped in these strings, I am woven. Allowing myself into the current of light to be made part of the movement that does not move. I am also composed of orange yellow white purple green. The unexpected is what fills us each with harmony, with glitter, with depth. My purple, my green. My rage, my joy. 

Anne Lindberg, Impossible Red, 2023, cotton thread and staples, 10 x 33 x 16 feet, photography by Derek Porter.