Plastic Mænad

Planning out

When I saw Julia over her Thanksgiving break, at the very start of my winter one, we decided that when she came home at Christmas, we would make a public sculptural installation somewhere. I told her I'd really love to do something that involved stringing yarn between trees, and Julia, the art-person, consented.

We met up again before Christmas in order to plan our sculpture. We really liked the idea of things hanging off of the between-trees yarn and blowing in the wind. So our starting place was "wind."

We toyed with ideas like stringing cut-out letters on the yarn to spell out words, and we were going to put bells on there that chimed when they blew around. We ended up though, deciding to begin with Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."

I got caught up in this poem in the Biblical imagery and idea of poetic power. Julia saw a different pattern: of destruction and subsequent re-creation from the destroyed parts. This pattern is what our sculpture is about.

Getting the things ready for

Last Thursday, Julia and I met to build the thing! I'd been collecting old recycling for a couple of weeks, and Julia had procured some yarn to use. The first step was to cut some holes in some recycling (the created things) so we could hang them up.

Then, we took some more recycled things and had to destroy them (so these were the destroyed things). We poked holes in them too and put yarn through so we could tie them up later.

The last set of things we needed were the re-created things. So we destroyed some more recyclables and used the pieces to build a face. We decided the face should be the maenad mentioned in the poem.

Installing of

So then we drove out to Parker's Lake where we'd decided to install it. It was 10 degrees outside, plus some ridiculous wind-chill, plus we were right next to a lake. It was super cold.

First we picked out two trees and strung up some yarn in between them. But then we had to tie all of the pieces onto the yarn. The thing was, we were wearing thick gloves and were trying to tie knots with thin (and sometimes really short) pieces of yarn! A few of them we managed to get tied on, but most of them we had to quick take off our gloves, tie the knots, and then put our gloves back on.

We were soon ridiculously cold but we were having so much fun! After finishing two of the panels, we went back to my car and warmed up for a while. With our morale back up, we finished the sculpture and took some pictures. YAY!!!


Here is the maenad in the wind:


Julia and I wrote out an artist statement that we posted on the side of the sculpture. Here it is:

Plastic Mænad

This project is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind.” The poem explores the destructive but ultimately re-creative power of the wind. The wind itself is a force of nature, but it also represents the power of artistic inspiration. In this project, we have attempted to show the cycle between creation, destruction, and re-creation.

We decided to use recyclable materials in our sculpture because this re-creative cycle is mirrored in the process of recycling. The bottom panel shows objects that might be thrown into a recycling bin. In the center panel, these objects have been destroyed, which is an essential step in the recycling process. In the topmost panel, these fragments have been reconstructed into a new form, reflecting the Mænad in the second stanza of Shelley’s poem. The image of the colossal Mænad in the sky is connected to the extreme power of the wind.

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm.

Lines 19-23 of Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind”

Returning to

Tonight after pottery class, I drove to Parker's Lake to see how the sculpture was holding up or even if it still was there. It's been six days since we installed it.

It's still there! Yay!!! Indeed though, it's looking quite ratty! Several of the yarn-pieces had twisted together so that it looked less like a web than it used to. The maenad's face was also wrapped weirdly with yarn so that she was looking down at the snow. Other hanging pieces had slid themselves along the yarn to one side or the other. I found one bottle halfway around the tree!

There wasn't any wind, so at the moment it all was still, but I'm sure it was the wind that twisted the yarn. I untwisted some of it but didn't work too hard, because it should probably be left to the elements anyway. I'm thinking I'll leave it up for another week or so and then come take it down. I'm so happy how this project has gone. : )

love, Jimmy