Span
The latest of Sandra Selig's thread installations, Span, was shown recently at the Brisbane City Gallery. These works have become a series within Selig's practice, and are just one of the many formal strategies she employs to explore the nature of the perceptual field in architectural spaces.
Span encompassed two rooms in the lower gallery of the Brisbane City Hall. The space itself presented some challenges; the ornate parquetry floor of the historical building and a temporary wall from a previous exhibition divided the gallery into two. Initially, it appeared that Selig's work was intended for a far more neutral space, but on further viewing it was apparent that it had been successfully adapted to the space—the issues were overcome through Selig's pervasive concern with site specificity. The two rooms thus denoted the two segments of the work, the first a diagonal delineation that drew you into the second space, where the web closed in to a central symmetrical light-filled cavern.
These breathtaking webs of cotton thread which arc across entire gallery spaces are remarkable in being both quite severe demarcations of space, and so fine and fragile that they sometimes disappear from sight. The arrangement of the threads creates Bezier curves, constructed by straight lines. This demarcation of space is familiar to a generation accustomed to the constructed artificial spaces of computer animation through line and matrices. In Span, the line invaded the space in a kind of ghostly mathematical or digital three-dimensional cluster of vectors and curves.
From a certain distance Span appeared like a flash of light from the corner of the eye, the remnants of the psyche charting a course through the space. This