Casey Wasniewski (MFA 2005)
I am interested in making objects that can be seen to have an immediate association with our bodies and nature. I would like my work to elicit a contradictory feeling of repulsion, familiarity, and attraction. My work ceaselessly establishes connections between the body and nature. The pieces are the accumulation of the unknown. They can be seen as a conglomeration of the dirtiness hiding within everyday life and the abstract beauty lurking beneath. The materials that I use are simple wool yarns embroidered together, knot after knot, an accumulation of knots, with random spurts of horsehairs. The yarn is knotted layer upon layer, not unlike the organs in our bodies, the cells in our skin or the mysterious 'imperfecti' fungi slowly growing. By combining these elements into clump masses, the work takes on a decidedly dirty and fleshy quality. A transformation from a clean rational understanding to one that is visceral is central to the understanding of my work. In trying to make this contradictory relationship apparent, I have chosen to display the work in a way that emphasizes both its' abject and formal object qualities. The ultimate goal of my work, however, is to arrive at a balance between these different aspects so that the viewer perceives them as constituting a larger most abstract unified whole.