DECADE PROJECT
Pressure (traps) captures both the felt sense, and the mechanism underpinning both my time at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the unwinding that was to occur over the subsequent decade. Pressure is designed to be a dynamic sculpture which interacts with its audience, although in this presentation we emphasize two states.
A twist on the childhood classic Chinese finger traps, the top state represents what occurs when a person inserts their arms deeply into the trap, and subsequently attempts to remove them. The trap returns the initial intent and traps the prey in its grip, with pressure proportional to how much one tries to fight their way out. The pressure is evenly spread so you cannot tell what is holding you, only that you cannot escape. The bottom state, on the contrary, represents the trap at rest. A relaxed and apparently harmless shape. Critically, as long as the object being wedged into the trap is of less diameter than the mouth of the trap, it will not experience an interaction, much less the feeling of being trapped.
A twist on the childhood classic Chinese finger traps, the top state represents what occurs when a person inserts their arms deeply into the trap, and subsequently attempts to remove them. The trap returns the initial intent and traps the prey in its grip, with pressure proportional to how much one tries to fight their way out. The pressure is evenly spread so you cannot tell what is holding you, only that you cannot escape. The bottom state, on the contrary, represents the trap at rest. A relaxed and apparently harmless shape. Critically, as long as the object being wedged into the trap is of less diameter than the mouth of the trap, it will not experience an interaction, much less the feeling of being trapped.
Curiously, by being made from kraft paper, Pressure (traps) conveys a sense of being organic. This aligns with both responsiveness to the interactor, as well as its allegorical representation for our lives, where sometimes we may feel trapped without realizing that not only is it our own doing, but that the harder we struggle the stronger the trap grips. This grip resonates with the feelings I experienced ten years ago, and re-feeling this, for me, holds a cathartic potential in its reflexivity.
