Larraine Seiden

Safety Nets

The Safety Nets sculpture project was born out of the uncertain time of the mass quarantine in early 2020. They are my response to the prolonged shelter in place that made us cherish our personal connections against a new backdrop of thrift.  To make them, I use the simplest domestically-sourced materials; cardboard rolls and kitchen twine with wax, as a metaphor for our sudden awakening to our interconnectedness.

 Through the repetitive act of connecting through knotting, I create something conceptually that is lacking. I call them Safety Nets, because against the backdrop of the pandemic, an authoritarian US presidency, and profound social upheaval, it has not felt safe. The Nets grow organically into biomorphic shapes that look like crowds or continents, while the titles reflect my vacillating hope and despair that surfacing tensions will move us forward and more together.

To hear more about my Safety Nets series, check out this talk I gave last spring.