The knotted form: where connection meets entanglement

There is something quietly radical about a knot. Long before the canvas or the bronze, humans looped fibre around fibre to make a thing hold its shape. The gesture survives in fishing nets strung off the Mornington Peninsula, in stockmen's leather thongs repaired on a verandah, in the tags of string that hold seed packets in the back of an Adelaide hardware shop. When an artist takes up that gesture in a gallery, she inherits a vocabulary older than any art history textbook. The knot folds space, hides and reveals at once, and refuses the clean line that drawing demands. It is a form that only exists because it is bound to something else.

For a practice that moves across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound, and installation, the knot offers a way to think about relationships without resorting to the didactic. Bodies become knotted together, materials become knotted to histories, and the work itself becomes a held gesture — the moment before the pull, the instant after the loop. Mawimbi's work has long attended to representation, mourning, and living presence, and the knotted form gives that attention a physical analogue. A knot is presence under tension. It is the body refusing to let go, and the world refusing to let go of the body.

The visual language of the knot

A knot is at heart a topological claim: this curve does not pass through itself, but it cannot be flattened. Mathematicians have spent centuries mapping its possibilities, and visual artists have spent at least as long borrowing those possibilities for less rigorous purposes. In sculpture, the knotted form does something a straight line cannot — it gives the eye a place to enter and a place to leave. The viewer follows a rope around itself and loses the thread. That loss is part of the contract.

In video work, the knot becomes temporal. A rope tied and untied across the duration of a piece holds the same logic as a held breath. The audience watches the bind form and the bind release, and reads both as a kind of breathing. The binding is not always rope, of course; it can be a length of ribbon, a strip of fabric, a cable. The material matters less than the relation it holds in place. The work keeps two things in company that would otherwise drift, and holding quietly becomes the medium.

There is also the question of legibility. A knot is partly hidden from itself. The centre of a sailor's hitch is the knot your eye only knows by inference, and the same could be said of a held grief. Mawimbi's sculptural pieces sit with that hiding. They do not pretend to be readable. They ask for a different kind of attention — the kind one gives to a sleeping face, or the way light falls on a familiar wall at dusk in a coastal suburb.

Knotting as practice: material and process

Process matters in any knotted piece. The hand does something the eye cannot fake. Fingers learn the difference between a sheet bend and a bowline, and that learning lives in the muscle. For an Australian audience, the resonance is local. Fibre work is a living tradition in this country, not least in the woven forms made by women in places like Ernabella in the APY Lands, where tjanpi spinifex grass is bound into sculptural animals that hold the desert in three-dimensional space. Mawimbi's practice sits in a different lineage, and the shared vocabulary of binding is real. The audience in Adelaide or Sydney recognises the labour that goes into tying, even when the materials are entirely different.

Material choice shapes the meaning of a knot. A knot in wax carries the warmth of the hand that made it. A knot in steel carries the memory of the mill that drew the rod. A knot in human hair carries the body that grew it. Mawimbi's work moves through these registers, sometimes within a single installation. The viewer encounters softness, then resistance, then the trace of a body that is not in the room. The form becomes a kind of memorial, a kept trace of a maker or a wearer, a held thing in a city that does not always stop to hold things.

There is also the labour of repetition. To knot anything well, one ties and reties, makes and unmakes, ties again. That repetitive labour is a kind of rehearsal, and it has its own duration. A sculpture made of knotted rope is a sculpture that contains hours, and the audience feels those hours when they look at the surface. The hand that tied it is absent but present, knotted into the work the way a memory is knotted into a muscle. The form refuses to be quick. It asks for time the way a long drive down the Pacific Highway asks for time, the way a slow afternoon at a regional gallery asks for time.

Tangle and repair: loss, mourning, and living presence

Knotting has always been close to mourning. The knot that is not undone is the knot that remembers. Many cultures have tied cloth, cord, or hair as a way of holding grief in place. The ancient practice of tying a ribbon on a tree for a lost loved one is older than any scripture, and Mawimbi's work, which takes mourning as one of its central concerns, sits inside that tradition without quotation marks. A knotted sculpture can be a kind of held breath, the body refusing to let the moment pass through.

The tangle, by contrast, is what happens when the holding fails. A tangle is a knot that has lost its intention. It is binding in the way grief is binding, the way a memory will not release. In installation, the tangle becomes a way of representing the mind that cannot finish its thought. The viewer walks through a thicket of cords and recognises the texture of a particular kind of afternoon, the kind that arrives when a loved one is no longer picking up the phone, or when the light in the kitchen has changed without anyone moving.

Repair is the third term in this triad. To mend and mender, to bind and binder, to close and closer. A knotted mend in a sock is a small sculpture of survival. Mawimbi's practice has long been interested in the forms that emerge when something has been kept going past the moment it was meant to end. The tied form is the mended form. The mended form is the living form. The knotted form, in these hands, refuses the brand new. It insists on the kept thing, the repaired thing, the thing that has been held together past its proper moment.

Performance, sound, and the body as knot

The body is a knotted form. Tendons loop through bone, breath loops through lung, the spine is a stack of small curves held in tension against gravity. When an artist works in live time, the knotted form becomes a way of staging the body's own topology. Mawimbi's performances often begin with a length of rope or a coil of ribbon, and the work that follows is a slow reading of what the body can hold and what it can release. The audience watches the knot form and re-form, and reads the form as a self-portrait drawn in cord.

Sound enters the knotted form through resonance. A vibrating string is a knot held in tension across a sounding body. A choir is a knot of voices tied to a single pitch, a community held in the air by the pressure of breath. The sonic knot does not look like a knot, but it functions like one. Mawimbi's sound pieces often braid field recordings with live voice, and the listener hears the moment when two streams of sound become tied. The tied streams make the held sound in space, and the held sound makes the held room around the listener.

There is the untied body in performance, too. The body that has come undone, that has lost the form that held it together. Performance gives the artist a way of staging that untying in public, with witnesses. The audience becomes part of the knot in that moment, because they have seen the untying and cannot untie their own attendance. The work passes into the community the way a song passes into a community. Once heard, it cannot be unheard. Once attended, it cannot be unattended. The knotted form, in live time, is a form that is also a contract.

Knots in conversation: community and shared practice

The knot is, finally, a social form. It takes two ends to tie a knot, and it takes many voices to hold a chord. Across cultures, people have used knotting to mark belonging, alliance, and shared work. In Latvia, the Latvian-American choir exchange of recent years has shown what it looks like when two singing communities bind their voices into a single room. The audiences who attend such gatherings read the social knot the moment they hear it, the same way they read a Sydney barbershop group tying its harmonies into the warm air of a suburban hall on a Saturday afternoon. The binding is audible, and the binding is also social.

Mawimbi's installations often gather materials that have come from many hands. A rope knotted from strips contributed by a workshop group becomes a different object than a rope knotted by a single maker. The audience reads the multiple makers in the surface, the way one reads multiple singers in a chord. The work becomes a record of attendance, and the record of attendance is also a record of care. A knotted rope that holds a room together is the rope that holds the people who tied it, and the room, in turn, holds the work. The holding is mutual. The form is communal.

This communal form has a particular weight in the Australian context. The country's art conversations, from the rooms of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Walsh Bay to the long galleries of the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen, have long asked how a national art scene holds its many practitioners at once. The knotted form gives that question a tactile answer. To make a knot is to make a community, however briefly. To tie a rope across a room is to tie a room into a community. To stand inside that room is to be tied to the people who tied it. The form is not a metaphor for connection. It is connection, in material form, and the form holds.

Untying object in installation

Installation gives the knotted form a chance to breathe. A rope tied in a workshop becomes a rope tied in space when it is hung across a gallery. The wall becomes the second hand. The viewer becomes the third. The work becomes a held gesture, an unfinished sentence, an open question. Mawimbi's installations often leave knots half-tied, or knots with loose ends that the viewer can choose to read as beginnings or ends. That openness is the work's most generous gesture, and the openness is itself the work's knotted form, the form that holds its meaning in suspension.

There is a quiet politics in this suspension. An object that is fully knotted has finished its work. An object that is half-knotted is still in conversation. The audience that walks through such an installation walks through a conversation, and the walking is also a tying. The foot that crosses the threshold is the hand that ties the knot. The audience that stays is the audience that holds it. The audience that leaves is the audience that releases it. The work passes from one set of hands to the next across the duration of an exhibition, and the duration of an exhibition is also the duration of a community held in attention.

That attention is what Mawimbi's practice asks for, and what the knotted form, at its best, sustains. To look at a knot is to give it the time it took to tie. To look at a half-knot is to give it the time it might still take. To make a knot is to enter a form that has always been social, always been bodily, always been a way of holding the world to oneself without grasping it. The knotted form is, finally, a form of care. It is the care that refuses to be quick. It is the care that holds the long afternoon of a Saturday in regional Victoria, the long drive down the coast, the long walk to the harbour on a humid evening in January. It is care in material shape.

If the work here speaks to a practice you are thinking through, the studio door is open. Selected pieces across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound, and installation can be viewed in the archive above, and the studio welcomes written enquiries about commissions, exhibitions, residencies, and conversation. To stay in touch with upcoming shows and new pieces, the entry is in the footer below. The form is being held, and there is room inside it for one more tie.