Using thread but not sewing

One television programme that we watch every week is CBS News Sunday Morning. It’s an hour and a half of short episodes about all sorts of topics such as art, food, entertainment, politics, history, humour and more.

We always record it and watch it later so we can buzz through the commercials (it has a ton!). We just watched the November 6 episode and one of the stories was about a new art gallery that has just opened in Bentonville, Arkansas called Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Designed by architect Moshe Safdie and funded by Alice Walton of the famous Walmart family.

As they were interviewing Ms. Walton and showing some of the pieces she has included in the permanent collection, I saw one piece that caught my eye not only because of its scale but the very unusual medium used to produce it. We wrote down the artist’s name and Googled her.

Devorah Sperber creates works of art using spools of thread. The installation at Crystal Bridges is called ‘After The Last Supper’ and it measures 85” high and 29’ long, but the remarkable ting about it is that it is made up of 20,736 spools of thread! You don’t just view it as you would a normal work of art because it is created upside-down and backwards. To see the piece the right way round you view it through a clear acrylic viewing sphere.

Ms. Sperber has been creating the 'Thread Spool Works' work since 1999. Her largest installation consists of 60,000 spools of thread. She has also produced other works using chenille stems, Letraset marker caps and map tacks all following the pixel theme.

Fascinating stuff and I now have a reason to visit Arkansas!