Touch…with permission
“Consentia” are a series of sculptures exploring consent and touch that came out of a long conversation with a new friend last year about my previous touchable works. Often when I talk about my Hanging Pods and Holdables that invite tactile interaction the reaction is one of excitement and a desire to experience it for oneself. This friend’s reaction was… different. She went directly to righteous indignation, something along the lines of: “you mean there’s no supervision, people just get to touch wherever and however they want? Who protects the art? Are they respectful? Do you really trust people to not be destructive?!”
Well… I mostly do trust people. In general. It’s a choice about how to live my life as much as a belief that most people have good intentions. Or at least not bad intentions. But as we went on to talk about current events and feelings of violation on a personal but also community and cultural scale I started to imagine ways that I might address the idea of tactile artwork that would also include a dimension addressing the negotiation of consent.
I first began making touchable art because my chosen medium of felted wool is so physically alluring; that aspect often came up with audiences even before I ever invited them to handle the soft surfaces and squishy textures of my sculpture. But I wanted to create some forms that looked intriguing and also had another dimension when held in the hand. I wanted to play with weight, density, and internal versus external forms and textures. To create such variances I inserted or felted around rocks from the yard, fishing weights, glass beads, and semi-rigid foam shapes. I varied the density of a given form by needle felting deeply or shallowly or compressing greater amounts of fiber in particular areas.
I decided to create small concrete bases for each piece to help position it, elevate it, and provide a material contrast. Bell or cloche glass jars with handles contained the “specimens” and suggested that they may be lifted off to allow access.
Finally, I wanted to put some guardrails in place, some rules that would be part of the interaction. Felt sculptures are inanimate objects, so to give some imagined agency as well as an element of chance, risk, or perhaps rejection, I had to come up with a contrived method to bestow permission or not.
My solution was to use a divining tool modeled after the “Magic Eight Ball” in which answers to simple questions are provided by shaking up the liquid-filled object to see the answer inscribed on the floating cube inside. I used a jar, created a floaty cube, and felted bright pink wool all around it (yes, I have lots of leftover wool from overordering for Toxic Beauty). The answers revea vary from ‘Yes Please’ and ‘Yes’ to ‘Maybe Later,’ ‘Okay,’ ‘If You Want To,’ and ‘No.’ Audiences who wish to touch a sculpture must first ask the Consent Ball for leave to do so.
The Startup Art Fair in Los Angeles February 27- March 1st will be my first chance to debut the performance aspect of this body of work. The fair takes place in a hotel; I’ll be transforming room 235 into my own gallery space for the weekend. I’m particularly interested to observe how people will behave when the answer is not a clear yes or no. “If you want to” is not an enthusiastic response or invitation. Is it heavy-handed? Yes. Is it playful? Also yes. Will it make people think? I hope so. I may need to find a way to collect responses. Curiosity and wonder never cease to motivate me.
