To be with you, to be free… / Installation / Brydee Rood 2012 The Waste Whisperer Series / Headlands Centre For The Arts San Francisco USA / Materials: Compostable and degradable rubbish bags, air, yarn, tape, rubber bands / This work was made possible with the generousity of Fulbright NZ and The Wallace Arts Trust / Bio Star rubbish bags kindly donated by Pitt Plastics USA
Across 3 weeks and 1 day, using 6400 strands of yarn, 800 pieces of tape and an uncertain quantity of rubbish bags and rubber bands in equal measure, I created this site-specific installation at the Headlands Centre For The Arts during the Spring Artist in Residence program. Spinning and catching the air I inflated each rubbish bag, up and down ladders drizzling the falling yarn in a neutral palette and subtly changing each section to reflect physical nuances (pale old mint greenish paint peeling over the wall in the corner, generations of brown stains trod into the wooden floor, pinkish tones fading across the patchy wall surfaces...) within the site and the wider headlands environment. To be with you, to be free… was spatially aligned to channel the setting sun as it flowed in the west facing windows. To end this installation I opened all the sash windows in the room to let the wild Headlands wind blow through, gracefully disheveling my work. The precarious nature of ideas balanced within a delicate structure, articulating something fragile and unknown, blown free by the elements. It was air that filled the inflated rubbish bag balloons and air that buffeted and billowed the installation to its end. Perhaps To be with you, to be free… also speaks to the complex nature of human relationships, our materiality and our habitat. The final punctuation of the work - a single tangled mass of yarn, like a large full-stop at my feet.
Images courtesy of Brydee Rood
