Landes Sullivan

Yours unless you stop noticing it (2022)

Media: handmade and cast abaca paper, bamboo, fabric, wire, cable ties

Statement: Making abstract art in a time of violent, hateful, uncertain crises is good for our heads. Showing that work is also good for something. Art in public belongs to anyone seeing it. When it becomes invisible to daily passersby, it becomes disowned and lost.

The atrium is angles and hard materials. It's about function and letting the outside in. Like the work that goes on there. Learning to make some art without pretense.

To contrast, we decided on wobbly, fragile, skeletal, curvy, colorful. We used translucent, handmade paper, fabric and loose-limbed bamboo splits.

We grew and stiffened the work by adding long, unsplit poles. Triangulating them echoed the atrium's calculated framework.

These thicker poles lashed with cable ties makes the floaty, curvy bamboo and rumpled handmade paper more gestural and more fluid. Instead of caging, the framework houses it.

Barbara Landes and Paul Sullivan collaborate as LandesSullivan on abstract sculpture using handmade paper and other materials including wood, bamboo, wire, rope, foam board and fabric.

We're based in Madison, WI. Our works reuse the same elements and objects in different compositions and series. That way, any sculpture's physical existence is always at the expense of other sculptures.

Our art as a body of works can only exist in memory or documentation.

landessullivan.com