Eva Hesse

The context of the relationship between drawing and sculpture in the work of Eva Hesse informs my practice because of the ‘role of the literalized line’ (Hauser & Wirth, 2017). Hesse explores relationships with the materials she uses, across all her works, there is this sense of ‘liquidity and compression’ (Hauser & Wirth, 2017) between the fluid ‘liquid line’ and the material state - ‘the word ‘compression’’ having ‘strong material connotation[s]… ‘to press together’- Hesse stages a ‘material truancy,’ and ‘a compelling dialogue between technical control and material leakage, concentration and dissipation’ (Hauser & Wirth, 2017).

Hesse’s works are generative. It is like they metabolise one another. I am interested in the way they feel like they are working through, thinking through, as though they are thinking tools. Or maybe it isn’t thinking; maybe it is more a sense of feeling. Hesse said, ‘maybe emotion is just as good as intellect’ (Tate, 2013), and her works leave ‘sensory impressions’ (De Zegher, C: 198). In her ephemeral way, teetering on failure, the materials Hesse uses are responsive, flexible, malleable, unstable. Caught up in a tension between ‘gaze and touching’ (De Zegher, C:186), they take on an ‘engendered body-psyche realm,’ something feminine, ‘part objects, interconnecting desiring machines’ (De Zegher, C:183).

I am interested in how Hesse enables an intense physical presence referencing bodily forms with her works that simultaneously feel body and other.