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Lucy R. Lippard

Her materials are plywood, pine, rope, brick, twine, nails, lathing, and trees. From them she makes compact objects, natural and easy in their physicality; unpretentious, but formally intelligent in their use of a tension between material and process, process and result. Their immediate impact comes from their scale, quite different from that of much current sculpture because it is so inherent, seems to depend so little on the space in which they are placed. Winsor's sculptures evoke the outdoors, not pictorially so much as by their tensile strength and crude vitality. Yet the process by which they are made is an obsessive, time-consuming one. The natural materials are bound and confined rather than gestural. The nature evoked is Norther in its rawness and rigidity, perhaps reflecting the artist's childhood on the bleak coast of Newfoundland, which "has been made barren both by civilization, when farmers cleared the land, and by nature, the wind and the sea." She admits to a "romantic, nostalgic connection" with the place. "It's the scale that has interested me. Most places diminish in scale when you got back to them as an adult. This one didn't at all. New York is the only place I've lived since Newfoundland that has that same sense of scale and dealing with the environment."

Winsor lists her central concerns as "repetition, weightiness, density, and the unaltered natural state of materials." I would have added scale, obsessiveness, time, nature, and a visceral body reaction verging on the sensual. Coming into her first one-woman show at Paula Cooper in October, 1973, where ten pieces lay or leaned or stood about in that vast and pristine space, one's first sensation was of dislocation. The scale of the sculpture is both immense and intimate. For instance, plywood square, in which no plywood is visible because it has been wrapped in rough twine until it has become a rounded and angular bundle with a surface bound into a cross-shape; first it looks little, then when you think of it as little, it suddenly looks huge for something that's little, and you realize it's big. Actually, it's just medium size (4' x 4').

The same goes for bound square, whose intimacy originates, I think, in an endearing awkwardness engendered by the fat wrapped corners, then deemphasized by the lean barked trees which seem particularly straight and solid between the rounded corners. Or maybe they are fragile, since they've been bandaged into an "unnatural" form (the square is very rarely found in nature); nature in traction, nature only temporarily tamed. Winsor often refers to "muscle" when she talks about her work, not just the muscle it takes to make the pieces and haul them around, but the muscle which is kinesthetic property of wound and bound forms, of the energy it takes to make a piece so simple and still so full of an almost frightening presence, mitigated but not lessened by a humorous gawkiness.

Repetition in Winsor's work refers not to form, but to process; that is, to the repetition of single-unit materials which finally make up a unified, single form after being subjected to the process of repeatedly unraveling, then the process of repeatedly binding or the process of repeatedly nailing into the wood or the process of repeatedly 

[[image]]
Jackie Winsor, untitled, 1972, near Richmond, Virginia, trees and rope, 8' x 8' 9'.

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sticking bricks in
repeatedly gouging out tra
materials are often recalcit
quality in the way she has
remnants of a puritan work
circular rope pieces have le
rope does coil naturally (the
the other hand, straight or
or squares made from trees
structures made from layers
piece made of flat inflexibl
gouged unnecessarily from
3/4" plywood - these imp
tradicts the basic "naturaine
in lies the "art," since "pro
on a simplistic level some
sculpture's large scale der
sense of how long it took
and how independent the
rounds and enlarges its fields
are obviously important, the 
provocative. Nail piece, fo
dotted with nails on each
physical embodiment of ag
work, the gouged or hacke
laminated plywood square
gouge mark is plain to se
Winsor was "interested in
energy. I like the fact that e
in it that can't be seen."
graphical core. When she w
planned a house and while
mother built it. At one poin
enormous bag of nails and le
to keep the wood in place.
whole bag of nails to do it.
down needed about a poun
about 12 pounds. My ath
used up all his nails. They
that it left quite an impressio
model her mother provided

The basic order, or geon
always thwarted by action
terials' or the process'incli
identities. Many women arti
and obssessive repetition (at i
have come into their own by
work primarily to contradi
perpetrate mysterious rituals
tent. There is a certain, ple
against perfection, or the c
despoiling neat edges and an
natural procedures that rela
personal experience. Winson
is a grid, but since the lines
straight; their natural origins
fact that one of them for
there are 10 poles at the
11 at the top, complicating th
effectively altering the "real
ings, in turn, despite their lu
(some are smaller than othe
to the piece by implication; t
complete.*

The "twine" Winsor used i