Maggie Nowinski

statement for "Cairn of wHoles: For What is Lost in Translation"

 

The cairns and wHoles arise from a desire to trace what’s lost in translation—between body and memory, between natural systems and the fictions we make of them, between the making and the statements about that which we make. They are accumulations of attention, fragments gathered through gestures of marking, twisting, folding, and stacking. Each form behaves like a remnant of something both biological and architectural, a hybrid organism that remembers having been part of a larger whole.

These structures resist stability but persist in presence. They sag, bloom, buckle, and hold one another in unexpected ways. The openings—literal holes—function as thresholds where internal and external states meet. I think of them as breath-spaces, or apertures where meaning leaks out and reorganizes itself. Sometimes they are spaces of grief or regret embraced.

The cairns operate as temporary monuments to what we gather: grief, insight, sediment, care... They recall ancient markers built from the simplest impulse—to place one thing on another so the land remembers. The wHoles reveal the rupture inside that gesture, insisting that these gatherings are porous and in flux.

Together, the forms create a sculptural drawing that invites the viewer to slow down, to look into and through, to inhabit a shifting ecology of openings and edges. They speculate a landscape of becoming and disintegrating, a formation in drift.

“The ‘somaliths’ (made of paper mache, paper clay and an armature of recycling) stacked at the base act as a tether-point, reminding me of deep time—an alternate pace. They share the same linear continuity and reveal my impulse to wrap, hold, and touch the surfaces as a way of more fully understanding form. At times, I think they reflect a yearning to pause time itself. Paul Klee once said, ‘a line is a dot that went for a walk’. For me, that dot is the here and now.”