Daniel Evan Schwartz » Selected Works Statement History Contact
In 2002, driven by my need for a reprieve from an ever–increasing reliance on technology during daily life, I consciously sought a direct and primal means of creation that required only my hands, mind, and a few simple materials. After many years of sculptural explorations since moving away from painting in 1995, I was exposed to coiling and other traditional basketry and fiber techniques. These methods of construction quickly became the foundation of my sculptural work.
My current work is constructed from the inside out in layers of crochet, binding, knotting, knotless netting, stitching, wrapping, and interlacing with a variety of threads, yarns, twines, and fibers. The pieces physically contain and visibly document the obsessive and laborious construction processes rather than simply depicting (or hiding) them. The materials I use range from prosaic to unusual, natural to synthetic, and domestic to industrial. My process is very much akin to drawing—flexible linear elements, or marks, are gradually transformed into solid sculptural forms, layer upon layer. The result is forms in which construction and surface are inseparable. This process enables me to realize forms that are clearly ordered but also with a kind of insistent spontaneity, or organized chaos.
I am increasingly interested in exposing the unseen innards of my prior work—to exploit my fascination with the normally hidden undersides and insides of work (and life), the unselfconscious marks on hidden surfaces—essentially, to turn my earlier work inside out. The forms are directly related to aspects of the human body, both anatomical and visceral. My palette is ‘of the body’—suggesting tissues, veins, muscle, fat, bone, fluids, etc.—both alive and decaying. My work both shows and implies an inside. My need to physically engage with and intimately respond to the object as it slowly unfolds, results in work of human scale—sized in direct relationship to my hands and body.
My goal is to make work that is full of dichotomy and paradox…at once alluring and repelling, comforting and disturbing, familiar and unknowable. I am also interested in challenging notions about practical, domestic techniques synonymous with “women’s work” and uprooting them. I have consciously used a lot of pink, soft, fuzzy, baby yarns juxtaposed with overtly oppositional colors and textures to create an uneasy tension between beauty and failed beauty, function and dysfunction. I aspire to create complex, honest work that defies definition and categorization, and compels the viewer to engage with it on their own terms.