Editorial @ www.ninajohnson.com
The works in this series began as drawings, visions of entwined bodies superimposed on the very basic structure of cloth: twist, warp and weft. Loose fibers bound together through a twisting motion form a line, a thread. As warp and weft, a grid, the line can be manipulated into a plane, a fabric, which as a garment can be given dimensionality and flow through time and space as an adjunct skin.
The sculptures begin with flow, play, and joy in the studio. The drawings surprise me with their sensuality and with the challenge to make an impossible object–a body with no beginning or end, a body with no body, a poetic body. I must make the object seem like it was always already there, fully formed, inconceivable in its previous state–flat white cloth on a table or 3×1 twill on an industrial loom. I revel in the technical work and the poetry that seeps out of textile processes.