Contact III, 1977

Manila rope (abaca) (17 parts)
©  Françoise Grossen; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo by Josh White

Françoise Grossen has worked almost exclusively with rope for her entire career. Seeking to move beyond the parameters of conventional textiles, she is best known for the large-scale sculptures she has created using her signature freehand knotting and braiding techniques. Since the 1970s, Grossen’s output has been firmly three-dimensional. Contact III is a demonstration of the scale of Grossen’s ambition, spanning a vast thirty feet. It was made from orange Manila rope—most commonly found in fishing nets and ships’ lines—and was first shown in Fiber Works: Americas and Japan, held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, in 1977. Grossen knotted the rope into seventeen sections arranged in a repeating pattern of vertical forms, each punctuated by several fuzzy pom-poms of deliberately frayed material. As the title suggests, these spheres—reminiscent of body parts—evoke a line of interconnected figures, standing hand in hand.