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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'. [[right edge of page cutoff in following text) 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