String Together

String Together was installed in The Garage at Burrard Arts Foundation, facing the street and running every day from April 22 until June 19, 2021.

A black line drapes across the white interior of the Garage. Strung along the line are colourful plastic detritus. Like an an oversized necklace, the line moves in space, causing the strung pieces to shift and slide.

The structure is reminiscent of a string of beads, manipulated between two unseen hands. The title alludes to the stringing together of words to form a sentence. It is also like an abacus for counting, a set of prayer beads, or a necklace manipulated by fidgeting fingers. Watching the objects slide back and forth, the viewer may be reminded of counting, tallying, wishing, planning, calculating.

The baubles on the string are the detritus of our era, the Anthropocene. They are the items that wash up against us, like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach after a storm. What do we do with these things? We gather them, sort them, recycle them, throw them away. This ebb and flow is reflected by the ongoing movement of the objects, back and forth along the line.