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in bunches from much larger rope, then knotted together, a laborious process which takes on a ritual quality in itself (I once helped unwind some, and can attest to the primitive, spinning-wheel monotony of the task). When I first saw Winsor's work early in 1968, this quality was centered in the image, which was fetishistic. She was working with latex and resin, and the unwound rope she used was fine, like hair. The larger pieces related to body scale, pieces knee-high, waist-high, etc. Then she began working with old, used rope, first covered with resin so it stood up by itself, then less posed, in coils, and rope wound around rope. Then she got hold of some huge rope with which she worked for several years. "I could barely move it, but just dragging it around the studio made it appeal to me much more than the thinner rope." She was pleased when a delivery man came in and saw double circle, "gave it a tremendous kick and it didn't budge....He seemed to understand its physical bruteness right away."
The sensuous, even sexual, properties of a heavy, languid, but willful line also inspired Winsor's only performance piece, executed in 20 minutes at 112 Greene Street, June 29, 1971. A quarter of a ton of 4" rope was hauled up from one floor to another, through a hole, by a "long, lean male"; below was a "soft, rounded female" who was feeding it up to him. Then the action reversed and the rope was lowered onto the curled-up female until it covered her completely. "What I wanted to bring out was the kinesthetic relationship between the muscularity of the performers and the muscularity of the ope and the changing quality of the rope as it was being moved. The scale and weight of the rope forced the performers to conform to its properties rather than the other way around."
The performance could be see from only one of the two floors at a time, with the other half suggested. This hermetic aspect appears frequently in Winsor's work. In brick dome, the bricks are stuck into the cement lengthwise, so only half of them make up the prickly surface, the other half providing a buried cone of weight. Fence puiece, a pen made of seven layers of lathing nailed inside and out, hides its contained space; you can't enter it and you can just see into it. Four corners almost succeeds in hiding the square of logs which is its armature, because the corners have been bulbously gigantized by hemp wrapping to the point where the corners are really all there is — a contradiction of the square by an oppressively organic repetition. She has also planned an outdoor piece which echoes the performance, as well as Newfoundland's underground rock and often domed vegetable cellars. It is to be a brick tower above ground leading

[[image]]
Jackie Winsor, 30 to 1 bound trees, 1971, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

to water below gro
accessible only by cl
bottom half of the ou
accessible -- underg
"The viewer would have
to really experience the
works of Winsor's tho
than strenuous physical 
"Indoors the size of
your own body and 
is made in. And what
was much smaller th
changed the relationship
environment.... The
The two Winsor has 
are planned for prince
imply hidden function 
"very scrawny kind of
were giant bundles of
trees bound singly and
were to run across the 
to be some local met
fodder, some practice
ficiently solved. The 
series is centered around
would this structure tha
up with the wind blowing 
it would blow over. The 
was making the piece, I 
with the fact that the liv
side... I saw the live
that work" 

In May, 1972, deep 
outside Richmond, Vir
dents, Winsor made a 
form of saplings bound 
rope. Here again, if one 
seem to have been built 
Esthetically, however, its 
was highly succinct--
that the raw materials 
from others like them, 
those small trees had be
to make a clearly person 
artists' (especially those 
sculptures down in a pla 
work is so finely attuned 
making sculpture outdoo
process. 

See the series of photographs of 
lanche, no. 4, spring, 1972, accom
Béar, from which most of the 
others come from conversations bet