Huge Tyvek Art Installation by Signe Stuart

Signe Stuart is an artist living in Sante Fe NM whose work is currently on display at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City SD. The Tyvek installation art exhibit called INSILENCE2 is being shown from May 10 to August 30, 2013. The images here are from this installation; the dimensions are 24' wide, by 10' high and a 30' extension into the gallery.

Signe provides this description of her work with Tyvek:

I selected Tyvek #10 paper-like material to make my INSILENCE installations. I had used various kinds of collaged paper in an earlier installation, Room2, but felt paper was too rigid. I wanted something that could roll up, drape and have a more fluid appearance. Added benefits are lightweight and easy to store. I tried various adhesives with the Tyvek collage and settled on Nori paste - easy to use and clean up. These installations are very large unpainted collages. Light is used dramatically to isolate and focus, to define and obscure, and to create shadow patterns on walls and floor to to suggest mood or atmosphere.

My first version of INSILENCE, a forty by nine foot passageway constructed of three patterned fields of collaged Tyvek, was presented at Untitledartspace in Oklahoma City in the summer of 2008. The process of constructing the fields was obsessive, intuitive and meditative... repetitive acts of cutting and gluing thousands of small pieces of Tyvek became a mantra to empty the mind and allow ideas to flow without judgment.

For the second version at the Dahl Art Center in Rapid City, SD, I reconfigured the three collaged fields to form a new variation: INSILENCE2. Two fields, each nine feet wide, were attached along a top edge of the gallery wall and pulled out diagonally onto the gallery floor, creating a passageway for viewers to walk through. The six foot wide field was suspended from the ceiling between and in front of the other two. In the darkened gallery, white light cascaded onto the side fields making the patterns appear to dissolve in places. A blue light directed toward the bottom of the center field faded upward. The three fields spread about thirty feet outward from the passageway in wavelike rhythms.. reminiscent of landscape or seascape. Patterned shadows fall on viewers walking through the passage making them moving aspects of the installation. The idea of field can suggest many things, among them expanding relationships, synapses, theories of growth. Passages suggest transitions between beginnings and endings, pasts and futures. The collaged Tyvek fields appear both crystalline and soft, transparent and opaque, revealing and concealing, alluding to dualisms that seem to be every where. ...reminding us of the diversity of patterns in nature. INSILENCE2 is paradoxically simple and complex.

From the Dahl Art Center's description of the exhibit:

In her most recent installation project, INSILENCE2, Signe Stuart creates an interactive space for introspection. Tyvek panels are draped from the back wall and ceiling extending throughout the gallery forming an intimate and thought-provoking passage for patrons. Patterned shadows fall over viewers in the passageway making them moving parts of the field as they pass through.

The surface of INSILENCE2 is paradoxically crystalline and soft, transparent and opaque, alluding to dualisms that seem to be everywhere. The surface is also reminiscent of nature’s patterns of inner structures and systems. The passageway is a metaphor for the transitions between beginnings and endings and the "field" metaphor for expanding relationships.
This installation is constantly in motion - with the movement of people and with the effect of gravity, eventually the installation piece will come apart and flutter to the ground, leaving patrons with only a memory of its existence.

About Signe Stuart

Find out more about Signe Stuart from her website: www.signestuart.net. Many thanks to Signe for sharing her innovative Tyvek installation art. All photos copyright Signe Stuart, used with her permission.

 

If you want to use Tyvek to create your own art installation, you can get more information about Tyvek paper and purchase Tyvek paper online. For further assistance, please contact Material Concepts or call us at 215-338-6515. Material Concepts is an authorized DuPont™ Tyvek® master distributor.