Edith Derdyk • the revolt of the line

“The spider weaves by pulling the thread from the web”
Luiz Vieira

Between, 2000
15.000 meters of black cotton line, 9.000 stapples and 3 days of setting up
GalerieHaus, Nürnberg, Germany
photo: Edith Derdyk

The lines in Edith Derdyk’s installation extend through the gallery in a descending plane. Her three-dimensional work embodies the essence of drawing by creating volume from flat lines. Derdyk is also informed by chores traditionally assigned to women, such as weaving. The labor-intensive work requires the artist to staple each thread to the walls, floor and ceiling until, slowly, a black mass begins to emerge.

The processes of creating and later dismantling the piece are integral to the work. Beautiful organic patterns are formed after Derdyk, scissors in hand, lets the threads fall to the ground or hang from the wall. The tension that held the whole disperses and the cycle is complete. The writer Noemi Jaffé compares the accumulation of small delicate particles into a powerful mass that imposes itself in space to the power of the weak to bring down the strong through patience and persistence, as a woodpecker bringing down a gigantic tree. Haim Chanin Fine Arts

Cut, 2002
28.000 meters of black polyester line, 14.000 stapples, 1 MDF 150 x 200 cms and 4 days of setting up
APCA Awuard, Tridimensional category
Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
photo: Edith Derdyk

Paint-less, brushless sumi-e of wires and leaves, in which space plays the part of paper, and wire has an effect of writing, the books, blank threads, are read from the inside out, sideways, important, askew, the wires of leaves in sometimes graphic, sometimes electric time, write rich rhymes, lines in all directions return, resolve our entanglements while the hard wood, naked flesh floats, suspended mature tree, a scare that thinks, a shiver of hairs is born, moves across, passes, dies in the pale skin where a nothing that moves in the strength of the wires still persists and reveals its lightness and elevates the weight of space with all the words unsaid
Alice Ruiz

Rasures III, 1998
60.000 meters of black cotton line, 10.000 stapples and 13 days of setting up
City Canibal, curator: Daniela Bousso
Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil
photo: Gal Oppido

No wonder weaving (in Portuguese) also means believing. It’s necessary not only to know what we see, but it’s also necessary to believe in the threads.
Noemi Jaffé

Rasures I, 1997
22.000 meters of black cotton line, 20.000 stapples and 13 days of setting up
Galeria Adriana Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil
photo: Gal Oppido

via the great splendired by Cybele Phillips