Artist Statement

Line, in the form of thread moving through space and interlocking with itself, becomes a plane: lace. Lace plays with space; it is continuous linear movement, and it is a flat object.

My installation is a drawing of a piece of lace from seventeenth-century Italy. I drew the lace pattern using Rhino 3-d, a CAD program used to design objects for digital fabrication. Flattening the dimensional representation into a wireframe drawing, I produced the image using a CNC vinyl cutter; I painstakingly reconstructed the spheres in the drawing by pressing pins or stitching wire into the existing wall. The obsessive handwork necessary to create these reliefs is immediately evident; this harkens back to the handwork of the original lace.

Designing something on a computer allows me to work outside of material space. The object becomes theoretical; it becomes a math problem, a series of vectors in space that are unencumbered by the laws of the material world.

I want to see what happens when I draw something in one kind of space and translate it into another. The two-dimensional and the three-dimensional trade places, back and forth. The work attempts a conversation between the exterior world (physical space, perspective space), and the interior world (a space of ideas, an invented space). I want to create something that is impermanent, fragile, and labored. I hope to pose questions about what is real and what is imagined.

- Jeanne Quinn, 2012