Gyoengy Laky: Screwing with Order
Purchase this book from our partner site here.
Edited by Tom Grotta & Rhonda Brown, Arnoldsche
Basketry encompasses many techniques most are woven in some way, using known techniques, sometimes several together. Assembled pieces are more puzzling as they appear to be randomly constructed. The work of Gyöngy Laky is incredibly varied, in materials, methods and scale–yet–always recognizably hers, springing from her impulse to create in three dimensions. This book details the trajectory of her work. It is beautifully and comprehensively illustrated with photographs from her early life to work of the present day. Laky is one of a group of artists in the Browngrotta stable and Screwing with Order, edited by Tom Grotta and Rhonda Brown, is accompanied by thoughtful and scholarly essays from leading writers on the visual arts. Mija Riedel writes about Laky’s early life and influences; David M. Roth and Jim Melchert about the ideas and philosophy behind her work.
During her career she spent time in Paris, then later worked in the family art gallery, and established a gallery of her own. Deciding to enroll at the University of California, she studied under Ed Rossback, giant of the new basketry, and Buckminster Fuller, and was influenced by the counter culture of the 1960s, and began to make constructed textile pieces.
Her methods developed–screwing, tying, pegging pieces together with natural materials, as well as found components. she uses whatever is around her: twigs, prunings, accentuated with paint, toys, fabric, nails, detritus in another context, the leftovers, carefully considered, given new life.
There is the importance of words and characters from a personal alphabet, hieroglyphics, almost. She has a curiosity about the shapes of letters and their meanings, arranging a language of branches, of nature, so that it may be interpreted. Her facility with languages, she arrived in the US as a refugee from Hungary, escaping a repressive regime, speaking Hungarian, learnt English, then French in Paris and studied Mandarin, gave rise to the use of words in her art. Often opposing words are constructed from different materials, yet make a meaningful whole. In a type of enthusiastic joinery, she turns words into a series of powerful statements about universal themes, leading us to think about ethics and identity. Not directly expressed, rather, like poetry, her works leave interpretation to the viewer, provoking thought, and reflection. Laky allows her work to speak for itself, saying that it arises intuitively, like a hologram.
••• Hilary Burns