Ariadne’s Thread by Mark Rautenbach
Curated by Emma Van Der Merwe
Cubicle Series, Circa, Everard Read Cape Town
3 - 24 January 2022
Performance-installation in three parts:
Knitting, installing [making a labyrinth], unravelling [making a ball of yarn]
The artwork uses the infrastructure of the building of the gallery, as a device. The balustrade, of the balcony outside the gallery room, is turned into a knitting loom. On this loom pieces of knitted fabric [roughly 3m x 4 m] are produced. The actual gallery room space is then used as a picture plane. The knitted pieces are suspended from the lighting infrastructure beams within the room. These suspended planes of fabric form a loose labyrinth pathway in and out of the room.
The thread that produces the knitting is drawn from about 200 sewing-cotton threads. This thread is continuous and runs through each individual piece of fabric, IE it is never cut. The knitting takes roughly a day to make, and gets suspended on the following day. This process will continue for 14 days. Over the last 7 days a single fabric is unravelled daily, and bound into a single growing ball of yarn.
The work honours and draws inspiration from two Goddesses and three women in Ancient Greek Mythology. Athene, who presides over the arts and handicraft, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. These deities are called upon to express themselves and be honoured through the work. The three women are Arachne, Ariadne and Penelope.
The Ancient Greeks took Genius as an attribute and quality that emanated from the gods. It was something that flowed through humans, but did not belong to nor come from the human who was ‘possessed by it’ as it were. Arachne was an exceptionally talented and gifted weaver. Athene took offence at Arachne claiming the weaving talent as her own. For her hubris, Athene cursed Arachne and her descendants to be forever hideously ugly [turning her into a spider], yet spin beautiful fabrics.
Theseus was sent as a decoy-ambush ploy along with the 20 sacrificial youths, to slay the Minotaur that lived within the labyrinth in Knossos on Crete. Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, the king of Athens, fell in love with Theseus. Ariadne made a deal with Theseus that if he would marry her, she would help him find his way back out of the labyrinth. She supplied him with a ball of thread which he secured on the outside of the labyrinth and unravelled on the way in. He was thus able to find his way out, but never fulfilled his promise.
Penelope spent decades waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War. Claiming that Odysseus was dead, Penelope was plagued by many suitors for her hand in marriage. Penelope refused to believe that Odysseus was dead. One of her crafty plans to delay marrying any of them, was to consent to marriage only once she had completed the funeral shroud she was weaving for her presumed dead Odysseus. Every evening she would unravel the handiwork she had done during the day, so that the work was never completed. Odysseus did eventually return to his Beloved.
I dedicate this work to the thread of love, through life, which humbles me, connects me, provides me with a path when I get lost and which, in the end, unravels me.
*****
Documentation
The entire performance was filmed by Inka and Sara. I wanted the documentation to be included in the installation as an integral aspect of the work. Inka came up with an ingenious solution; to have a collage of the footage looping on a lap top in one of the boxes that housed the sewing threads. She placed a mirror over the keypad, thus mirroring the video image and creating something quite compelling and curious.
Knitting loom and knitting
Single continuous thread from 200 threads [the-many-to-the-one-to-the-many]
Five fabrics
Installing the labyrinth
