Every day Pinterest emails pics of things it thinks I might like, but all this stuff barely involves humans, it’s just clever algorithms that work out from what you look at online what else you might like to see.  It’s often wrong or a bit wide of the mark, but when ‘they’ get it right, as today, it is wonderful.

Through Pinterest I discovered the work of Anna Santinello

Woven wire sculpture  (c) Anna Santinello

How exhilarating it must be to construct such a large sculpture from the inside out, having the organic shape curl around you as it goes.  Santinello says: “I represent life as comprised between two doors: birth and death. That is why my sculptures are broken off, with bodies seeming to crumble. Building, starting to destroy, to be and not to be, in our life we, like the blind, are unable to grasp its meaning if we lack any reference point.”  Hence the wonderful frayed edge, visible in many of her other sculptures and installations.

Untitled, woven copper and iron wire, 26 x 28 x 20cm.  (c) Anna Santinello.

Edges, or lack of them, can be very powerful points in a composition.

Santinello’s website contains a very thought provoking artist statement, bringing to mind things I see the same way – as in “It is the work leading you….. a final result slowly taking its shape in a complicated plot of matter, at the same time soft and so resistant. Coming out of the mere strength of my hands.”  The medium and technique enables a total change of scale without compromising any of her ideas:

Woven silver wire jewellery  (c) Anna Santinello

When you visit her website, and be sure to scroll down on every page, because on first visit to the jewellery page for example, I had no idea that by scrolling beyond the first line of images in a slide show, I would find collections of her jewellery grouped by year. When you look at all of them you’ll be struck as I was at the blend of light femininity in the symbols in her designs, but also the lacy textile like look of the woven wire.  It’s easy to forget these are not made of thread but of wire.  They appear to be lacy ‘textiles, and I’d love to handle some.

Woven silver wire neck piece 2004.  (c)Anna Santinello.

My thanks to Anna Santinello who granted permission to use her images in this post.