85 x 101 cm | 33 x 39 in
Subject: Abstract
Materials used: branches, string, yarn, chewing gum
Come with openness to the elements at play to Kainoa Gruspe’s work spangled with delight and with earth. Across a gauze canvas in the shape of a rainbow, dirt and paint are moulded and flecked, as if spontaneously. These works are rooted, embedded, entangled; eclectic, and foregrounding materiality. The artist’s explorations are informed by natural context, he’s originally from Hawaii. Gruspe has also made hats and musical instruments, and this knack for making functional objects is at play in these dimensional artworks.
In them there’s a real sense of surveying one’s environment. The available information comes from different sources, those major: science, religion, philosophy, and minor: dirt, small stones, rope, bits lost and found. These works are fibrous and organic; imagery, if present, is secondary. The physicality is primary: the transit of materials across the field of the known, leaving and re-entering under different auspices of understanding. The welding and webbing of materials is temporary before new connections are made in the dissolution of the old. As an attitude to the world, these works imbue, wonder is useful.