Last week I attended a lecture of the artist Orly Genger, I had not known of Orly’s work before but went after I saw her work online. She was a very petite young women who was surprisingly blase in talking about her art and practices.  I found this both humorous and charming since her work is giant and comes out of the minimal aesthetic and she was speaking in front of about 75 mostly 50+ women.  They wanted clear cut answers and Orly like many young artists, including myself, just don’t.  I really enjoyed how Orly’s process has just evolved and her creation of works is not overly planned or planned at all initially, allowing for the process to guide the work.  Yet, the result is impressive in both scale and ambition.

Orly hand crochets heavy ropes, often mountain climbing rope, into VERY large scale installations reminding us of color field paintings, miminalist sculpture, and what is generally associated with a very “male” period in art history. Orly creates work that stands alongside and often outshines the renowned work of the past.

A  perfect description from the Aldrich Contemporary Art museum:

Genger transforms knitting’s intimate, homespun aesthetic into large-scale works that relate more to post-Minimal sculpture and the color fields of late modernist painting than to craft projects. Her technique, which dispenses with needles altogether, deliberately narrows the distance between original idea and final object. Genger weaves thick strands of rope, elastic strapping, yarn, and metallic ribbon with only her fingers; the resultant objects are indexical traces of her unique process and directly convey the painstaking labor that goes into their creation.

I admit that this work is not generally my aesthetic but the shear size is so inspiring.  To take craft so outside of its fragile materials and to create large scale outdoor sculptures that can withstand both weather and the public- that is something I would love to see more of. To see a very cool video of her work in action check this out.

And Orly does not stop there she is now collaborating with jeweler Jaclyn Mayer to create some truly lovely crochet rope necklaces.  They would create a goddess out of all of us.