Qing Ye

FINALIST

‘Nature’

MONA is a seductive, visceral, subterranean PANDORA’s box like space. From ephemeral works by James Turrell to that of extreme weight and elaborate intricacy by Richard Wilson and Jean Tinguely, there is a sense of mystery, myth, delight, but also perhaps of trepidation. PHAROS was the world’s greatest lighthouse. Lighthouses are used to alert, often to warn. BOULLÉE’S CENOTAPH was meant to house the dead body of a Christian man of science who dedicated his entire life to the investigation of the physical universe. It also reversed night and day.

There is something profound, unsettling, and resolutely dichotomous and uncertain in all the above. Perhaps it would be fitting to confront the elephant (or perhaps the Minotaur) in the room, NATURE, itself.

Finally after squeezing through MONA’s many subterranean crevices, a germinating spore has taken hold on one of the gallery walls and threatens to take over. NATURE has finally been able to infiltrate this gridded geometric bastion of 21st century human cultural endeavor, forcing visitors to come to reckon with the very origin of life.

The proposal abstracts an image of ancient Tasmanian rainforests. A prehistoric fern in the center is woven in highly detailed three-dimensional volume, further out the work transitions to become an abstracted woven texture, and at its edges the weave becomes more and more sparse to allow both light and people to pass through, as well as give full expression to the underlying filigree of warps and wefts that underpin tapestry. The proposal seeks to be both figurative as the earliest tapestries were, and textural as the works of more recent fiber artists. Most of all it seeks to stand apart from the existing abstract and perceptual installations and provide a more direct reference through tapestry’s quality of incorporating the figurative and haptic together.