Woven: Woven Together project
DATE | 2023
LOCATION | Portsmouth, NH
MEDIUM | Bronze
DIMENSIONS | 9ft x 32ft x 5ft
Woven is a site-specific public sculpture by Vivian Beer positioned along the pedestrian path leading from the street into the brick market courtyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire's historic downtown. The work takes a visual language historically associated with women’s labor and domestic craft and blows it up to architectural scale, transforming weaving from something intimate and often overlooked into something monumental, structural, and impossible to ignore. As pedestrians encounter Woven on their way into the courtyard, the sculpture operates as both threshold and provocation. Its open structure invites movement and shifting views, while its bronze weight insists on permanence. Fabricated in bronze from flat sheets of metal, Woven mimics an oversized knitting pattern of interlocking strips, loops, and crossings. Bronze, the material of monuments, permanence, and institutional power, is asked to perform as textile. It is a delicious inversion: a material traditionally used to commemorate power takes on a form historically relegated to the domestic sphere. The work reflects Beer’s ongoing interest in disrupting the gendered hierarchies embedded in art, craft, and industrial production. Woven collapses the old divisions between craft and sculpture, domestic labor and monumental production, feminine and masculine materiality. What has traditionally been coded as soft, decorative, or secondary becomes structural, commanding, and decidedly public. Beer turns the familiar language of knitting and weaving into something monumental—and asks us to reconsider whose labor, whose aesthetics, and whose ways of making have historically been granted the authority of art.
Goals
This was a two part sculpture commission working with and within the landscape and architectural design of the Brick Market development in Portsmouth NH.
Process
McNabb Properties and Woodburn &Company landscape design reached out for a design concept. We then worked together for a design www.mcnabbgroup.com www.woodburnandcompany.com
Additional Information
Woven is part of my site responsive concept "Woven Together" for the Brick Market development in downtown Portsmouth NH.The pieces are abstract delving into pattern and fabric, fashion and empathy. Sculptures embedded in a feminist approach while leaving room for individual experience/imagination.
