SPATIAL PROJECTS
Esther Ferrer began his Spatial Projects (Proyectos espaciales) series in the 1970s. The Museum is exhibiting the earliest installations in the series, where she used cardboard or foam board (like those in architectural scale models) and threads.
Ferrer puts it this way:
I’ve never been especially interested in carrying out my projects in a physical space or on a large scale. If the model works, the work is done as far as I’m concerned. If I can’t set it up in a real space, never mind. What interests me is the process.
During her creative process, the artist attaches threads to the different planes of the model, walls, ceiling and floor. She measured regular distances between the connections so that the threads will look like lines running across space in geometrical patterns. Their infinite variations are the motif that gives these works their serial character. By varying only small details, like the number of threads or the distance between them, the mathematical basis for the installation is completely modified and an infinite number of different results are obtained.
Threads, cables, elastic bands and string are fragile; some of them are ordinary and flexible, things that everyone has at home. Ferrer uses them in her installations, nailing or pinning them to the bare walls, the floor and the ceiling, fixing them with clamps or nails. She thus intervenes in the space with a minimum of elements, giving it a new set of characteristics that modify the viewer’s perception.
Ferrer subjects these elements to intense mathematical rigor, positioning the clamps at different intervals measured so that they will alter the way the viewer perceives space and how they move in it. With parallel threads that run from the floor all the way up to the ceiling, the artist creates geometric shapes and angles that break or fold at the corners.
About her Spatial Projects series, the artist says:
In some installations I decide to submit to a rule—it’s a way of eliminating my subjectivity as far as possible—or to a system I’ve decided on, such as the series of prime numbers. On the other hand, there are others I structure in an aleatory fashion, allowing myself to be guided by an intuition that determines the rhythm.