ARTISTS STATEMENT: WORKING WITH TIRES
by Travis Cohn
For the Spiritual Visions Exhibition, The Hermitage Museum and Gardens, 2010.
For me, the leathery, black rubber of an old tire has its own spiritual presence, and in my work, I seek to honor that presence. Imagining the tire turning, over, and over, over so much terrain, I can’t help but think it must become a little bit wise in the process, in this repetitive, constant contact with the road. For me, I guess, tire rubber has become a metaphor for the soul’s experience in the world.
Perhaps it is significant that I started working with tires while I was living in my van in the ‘industrial wasteland’ of W. Oakland, while teaching health and urban gardening, through Americorps, in the grade school’s there. It felt like a tumultuous moment in history; the attacks of 9-11 had just rocked the foundations of the western way of being in the world, and closer to ‘home’, that year there was both a state take over of the Oakland School System, as well as a federal slap-down style take over of the traditionally grassroots-led Americorps program. Massive monoliths seemed to be shifting all around us, and my job seemed to be to protect the tiny tender worts and mosses, growing in the cracks between empires. Have you ever scraped your knee on the pavement, and had to dig the pebbles and asphalt out of your flesh? At night, after work, I would often retire to my van, and spend the night mentally picking pebbles out of my soul; images from the day swimming forward; a young African American student, beaming, seemingly unaware of the telltale yellow pollen dusting her nose. Looking back, I wonder if it was this particularly gritty contact with ‘the road’ that led me to connect with these tires.
To give voice to, and explore some of these feelings that I project onto this material, I have taken these road worn tires to ‘the mat’, and reworked them. I have wrestled them, bent them, twisted them, tied them, turned them, burned them, chopped them, sliced them, punctured them, carved them, and gently coerced them. And finally I have reconfigured them into (among other objects) a form, which I feel finally does the tires justice, and which I personally find endlessly sublime and transfixing…
I call this form a ‘treadknot’. It is composed of a single strand of worn tire rubber, which weaves and winds, serpent-like, endlessly over and under itself, struggling with it self, tying itself in a knot, and in this process, ultimately re-finding itself. And the result of this weaving and rejoining of ends, is that this single strand creates not only a knot, but, in so doing, also a vessel, capable of carrying another object, in the empty and still space at it’s center. (Elemental, single-celled, primordial basketry, if you will). Like the ouroboros (or snake swallowing its own tail, of ancient and classical mythology) the treadknot is a form that, in its winding, searching and struggling way, evokes, for me, the arduous, but rewarding process of self-regeneration. This is what I have brought to the tires, or perhaps, more accurately, the place where they have brought, and continue to bring me to.
I would very much like for my tire artwork to be included as a part of Spiritual Visions. Why? Because in this work, I seek to bring forth the tires’ road worn beauty and wisdom. I believe that its inclusion in the show would honor this work, as well as the tires that are both this work’s material and its subject, its means and its end, its journey and its destination.
