Working at the confluence of art and interior architecture, Brooklyn-based Sui Park creates three-dimensional organic-like sculptures out of cable zip ties. Typically used to fasten electric cables and wires, the zip ties provide Park with a flexible and translucent medium that is effective in creating dynamic forms, space, and ambience out of product that is ordinarily static.Park's latest zip tie project, Thought Bubbles, will be on exhibition at the Governor's Island Art Fair in New York City, every weekend through September. Park places her organically-inspired artificial forms in what looks like a home's living room, so that it seems like microscopic life has suddenly grown stupendously large, like Alice eating that wondrous “EAT ME” cake in Alice In Wonderland.
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Creating three-dimensional organic shapes out of mass-produced, artificial materials might, as Park muses, create an irony, but she thinks it's one that can lead to something “illusionary.” Like architectural modules, Park can easily fabricate the ties, then precisely manipulate them to order her thoughts. She also uses translucent monofilament, a clear fiber commonly used in fishing lines, for the very same reason.
While the zip tie forms might like look like amoebas or other types of micro-organisms, Park insists that she doesn't attempt to follow or create any specific biological forms. Rather, she gets her inspiration from Mother Nature's “magical and marvelous” organic structures.“My artwork could be an example of how thoughts may look like, as I try to show changes and evolutions in how we perceive and reconsider,” she said of Thought Bubbles. “Thoughts can be easily acceptable, flexible or sometimes indifferent or even stubborn. Thoughts can be parallel or perpendicular, and they can be continuously protective over time, built firm and fixed, or gradually changing.”Other forms, as Park notes, just fade away. And it's the diversity and evolving nature of human thoughts that she is attempting to visualize with Thought Bubbles, which she said can be interpreted in various ways, from landscapes and living organisms to social ideas and anything we accept as existing. Ultimately, Park wants audiences to see, think of, and feel our surroundings from multiple perspectives.
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