Contact III

The Swiss-born artist Françoise Grossen has worked almost exclusively with rope for her entire career. Seeking to move beyond the parameters of conventional textiles, she is best known for the large-scale sculptures she has created in her signature freehand knotting and braiding techniques. Since the 1970s, Grossen’s output has been firmly three-dimensional. Contact III is a demonstration of the scale of Grossen’s ambition, spanning a vast thirty feet. It was made from orange Manila rope—most com- monly found in fishing nets and ships’ lines—and was first shown in Fiber Works: Americas and Japan, held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, in 1977. Grossen knotted the rope into sev- enteen sections to form a repeating pattern of vertical forms, each punctuated by several fuzzy pom-poms of deliberately frayed material. Reminiscent of body parts, these spheres—as the title suggests—evoke a line of interconnected figures, standing hand in hand. Speaking of her fabrication technique, she has explained, “My sculpture is cumulative: rope upon rope, braid after braid. . . .
I build a volume and a surface rather than subtracting it from an existing hard mass as one would from stone or wood.”