‘We were forced to go back to natural things rather than having good paper and good materials that we bought, and I think that was very good for us. The web of an insect, it looked more modern than modern things at that time.’ - Asawa on her years at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1946-1949)
This past month I’ve been looking into the art of Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), inspired particularly by the beautiful focus and patience of her artistic practice, and the undulating shapes of her wire sculptures, suggestive of underwater creatures and coral reefs. Like dancers, the appearance of weightlessness belies the heavy work of their material.
Asawa learned the technique she was most famous for, how ‘to knit with wire’, from craftspeople in Mexico, who would make baskets to carry their eggs and produce to market.
It doesn’t bother me whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art.’
Jason Vartikar suggests that Asawa’s closed sculptural forms represent a ‘radical universalism’, representing not just biomorphic shapes but cells, the ‘fundamental building blocks of life’, transcending plant, animal, and racial categories. At Black Mountain College, Asawa also studied biology and cell division, and had a collection of zoological engravings.
Vartikar situates the seeds of this ‘radical universalism’ in Asawa’s formative experiences during World War Two and afterwards. Racism and intensified anti-Japanese sentiment following Pearl Harbour led to Asawa’s internment in Arkansas in 1942, and later prevented her from completing a teaching degree.
Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, one of Asawa’s most influential teachers, fled Nazi Germany and became an instructor at Black Mountain College (with his wife, the wonderful artist Anni Albers). In 1950, UNESCO issued its first statement of racial equality for all humans, signed by leading scientists of the day, although of course racial discrimination continued.
In this context, Asawa wrote to her future husband that she would be:
a citizen of the universe … I want to wrap fingers cut by aluminum shavings and hands scratched by wire. Only these two things produce tolerable pains.
Vartikar proposes Asawa’s lobed sculptures as ‘primordial beings, the evolutionary processes and the universal biological particle that are common to all the creatures of earth. And in such a way their biomorphic contours suggest the repeated forms from nature in which all humans merge as an equal kin.’
Do you have any favourite artists who have been inspired by nature and natural forms? I would love your recommendations!