Pausing place, uncounted

The sky is often thought of as a limitless expanse; endless and unbounded - freedom writ large in a field of blue. And yet, we know that this is a fallacy. The blue belt that hugs the earth has a circumference, a limit point. It tapers out before the pitch-black of deep space begins. But even so. It’s that blue that - in looking up - we think of as infinite, as open possibility, unsurprisingly really; a black hole isn’t an entirely upbeat metaphor.

But what happens when the blue is brought down to earth? In Mira Gojak's work 'Pausing place, uncounted' 2019, bundles of blue yarn are tightly wrapped around a steel rod. The bundles are bulbous, bloating and weighing the sculpture down. Yet weightlessness is also at work. The total length of yarn wrapped around this metal form corresponds to a succession of looped distances from the ground to the top of the stratosphere (the point at which the blue bleeds out). Here, we find the expanse of the sky compressed into anxious-looking nuggets. Collapse becomes a theatrical, poetic gesture. But while this structure appears shaped by gravity and the tug of centripetal force, it is far from deflated. Not so much expunged from the sky as exhaled, released. Free, even.