Naama Tsabar Work On Felt (Variation 8), Grey, 2015 Felt, carbon fiber, epoxy, wood, guitar tuning peg, piano string, piezo and amplifier Work: 247.6 x 157 x 88.9 cm
In this ongoing series of work raw industrial felt is transformed into modifiable stringed instruments. Through the addition of carbon fibre, piano strings and guitar tuning pegs, the felt pieces take on new features that contradict their natural character. The work recalls the Postminimalist art of the 1970s extending its application by merging minimal aesthetics with performativity. Viewers are invited to directly engage with the works by plucking the strings and creating a new acoustic landscape. The works output sound through human encounter —tightening or loosening the strings changes the degree of the bowing of the sculptures and the sound they make. The transformative nature of the work is such that the appearance of the sculptures, their erectness or flatness, directly corresponds to the pitch they produce.
Reflecting on the use of felt as a material in her earlier works Tsabar notes; “I was thinking about Robert Morris’s post-Minimalist gravity felt sculptures, and the deadening of sound in relation to Joseph Beuys’s felt suit for a piano. My first two pieces were on the floor, and in late 2015 I moved up to the wall.” [Bomb Magazine, Sculpture and Sound: Naama Tsabar Interviewed by Naomi Lev, 2018]
