The screw as thread: turn and grip
A screw is among the most familiar manufactured objects: small, cheap, designed to disappear into a joint. Yet its spiral makes an unexpectedly rich proposition. The thread both draws separate pieces together and cuts a path through the material it pierces. Connection here is never innocent. It depends on pressure, rotation, friction and a precise relation between force and restraint.
The proposition of the screw as thread produces an image of continuity with tension inside it. A coil joins what would otherwise remain apart, yet each turn repositions the line. It suggests a bond that must be kept active, maintained by touch and renewed through repeated gestures. The paired imperatives—turn and grip—locate agency in a narrow space: the hand acts, but the object also answers back.
That double movement shapes how Alexandra Mawimbi’s work can be encountered across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation. A spiral may become a body, a score or a spatial condition. A fastener may operate as image, prop, sound source or connector. Across these media, usefulness gives way to attention, while the apparently mechanical reveals itself as social, embodied and open to memory.
The portfolio and professional archive present this inquiry without enclosing it in a single medium. Selected works sit alongside biography, news, exhibition histories and documentation, allowing form and context to meet. Melbourne, where Mawimbi’s practice has developed within a dense network of studios, galleries and public institutions, provides a particular setting for this material language. Its working culture offers both an audience for experimental work and a familiar reminder of how objects are built, repaired and discarded.
A spiral made visible
The thread of a screw advances in a helix: a line that gathers depth without forming a closed circle. On a two-dimensional surface, that movement can suggest a body turning, a voice winding into urgency or a contour moving across terrain. In sculpture, scale alters the object’s authority. An enlarged fastener can resemble architecture, machinery or a body under strain, while a minute one invites the gaze to become forensic.
Material carries those associations before language reaches them. Steel can recall industry, extraction and fabrication as readily as strength; plastic can suggest speed, disposability and synthetic abundance. A darkened surface, worn edge or trace of handling interrupts the clean promise of the catalogue image. These are not simply effects of age. They register touch as a form of authorship, placing the labour of making beside the labour implied by the object’s origin.
Placed in Mawimbi’s practice, such contradictions allow the fastener to operate as a compact model of representation. It is a manufactured sign that has been assigned a use, ordered into a system and valued for something other than appearance. At the same time, it exposes how identities and objects can become fixed by convention. Its image can ask where agency resides: in the design, the tool, the worker, the body receiving the object or the viewer assigning it meaning.
The body supplies the instruction
Movement activates the screw. A screwdriver completes the circuit between intention and resistance; fingers feel when a thread has caught. Performance can externalise that exchange, making torque visible through wrists, shoulders, breath and hesitation. The effort need not be spectacular. A repeated turn, a stalled hand or the body’s compensating weight can reveal knowledge held outside language, where competence resides in timing rather than command.
Video extends this knowledge into duration. Rotation can be slowed until a practical action becomes unfamiliar, or looped until action resembles compulsion. Sound intensifies the encounter through the scrape of metal, a brief catch or the hollow resonance of a joint. These recordings do not simply illustrate the object; they make the conditions of its movement audible and visible. The work becomes a record of a relation formed in real time.
That everyday dimension is sharpened by Australian habits of assembly and renewal. Flat-pack furniture, garden projects and weekend repairs often begin with a familiar trip to a hardware aisle at Bunnings. A missing or ill-fitting part turns a smooth instruction into a small negotiation with instructions, packaging and discarded components. For viewers in Australia, the screw can arrive with domestic familiarity before it becomes metaphor. Its grip is tested at kitchen tables, in rental flats and on suburban workbenches.
Pictures of force and release
In two-dimensional work, the spiral can be pressed into line, shadow, grid or repeated mark. Its pull is immediate: the eye travels, catches and resolves. Yet the image can also frustrate that travel by making the centre uncertain or the sequence hard to read. Force appears as a visual pressure, while release is suggested by the spaces between turns. Drawing the screw becomes an exercise in showing how a binding principle can be interrupted without being erased.
The visual language also permits an examination of representation beyond likeness. To depict a screw may be to depict labour, value, dependency and the unequal distribution of control. A thread can resemble a boundary that enables contact only after it penetrates. Such a form can hold different histories in tension: handwork and industrial production, migration and settlement, the tool’s promise of repair and the material histories concealed behind its polished surface. Meaning gathers where utility and power overlap.
Within Mawimbi’s sustained attention to mourning, absence can be approached through what has failed to hold. A loosened fastener, a vacant fixing point or a gap in a recorded sequence gives form to loss without requiring a portrait of the dead. Repair becomes a way of thinking about memory: not restoration to an untouched past, but a present-tense act that keeps a relation visible. The archive and the object share this capacity to register absence while resisting its finality.
Time, sound and the living present
Turn is duration before it is direction. In video, the screw can mark time through repetition, resistance and interruption. Its axis becomes a clock that does not simply count seconds; it reveals the uneven pace of concentration. In performance, duration can place effort at the centre, asking the body to labour within a structure whose completion remains uncertain. The viewer understands the work through endurance as much as through recognition.
Sound makes the metal’s near-life especially apparent. A knock announces contact before meaning settles, and the pitch of turning changes as pressure increases or a thread slips. These are small events, but they locate the work in a shared sensory world rather than an isolated art object. Breath, friction and room resonance produce a temporary composition. Presence is audible as an activity taking place now, even when the work turns toward lives that cannot be restored.
Melbourne’s cultural geography sharpens this sense of encounter. Galleries occupy laneways and former workshops; openings punctuate the week with moving crowds, printed lists and conversations carried between tram stops. The journey from street to studio can be as meaningful as the threshold of the exhibition. In this setting, sound and gesture meet a public that understands artistic work as both encounter and event. The fastener’s minute mechanics enter a city attentive to construction, change and the social life of materials.
Material enters the social world
In installation, fastening becomes spatial. A suspended element asks how it is held, what would happen if its support gave way, and how a visitor’s body alters what is seen. The logic of the screw can organise proximity: one object turns towards another, a passage narrows, a surface meets a wall. Rather than describing attachment from a distance, installation lets attachment become a condition of movement. The viewer enters the work as both observer and potential load.
The local market gives this spatial thinking a practical frame. Melbourne’s artist-run spaces, independent galleries and commercial venues operate alongside a strong design culture, sharpened each year by Melbourne Design Week. Across these settings, makers and audiences negotiate what an object is for, how it reaches the public and how its value is sustained. The screw sits at the meeting point of industrial production, studio experiment and domestic use, a modest connector within a much larger economy of objects.
Documentation and copyright matter because a work’s public life continues after installation. Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 provides creators with moral rights in authorship and integrity and establishes default rules for ownership of commissioned artworks, while contracts can redistribute some economic rights. For an artist’s portfolio, that legal framework makes careful records essential: titles, versions, materials, dates, image permissions and the status of moving-image and sound works. The archive is not a neutral container but part of the work’s stewardship.
Repair, resistance and the ethics of holding
A screw is never only a solution. It can strip, seize, rust or fail under forces that exceed its design. Australian conditions make that vulnerability tangible: salt-laden air near the coast, summer heat in workshops and dust from bushfires enter the life of metal. These realities resist the fantasy of seamless assembly. Repair culture often values patching and reuse, yet every repair also conceals a decision about what to keep, replace or let go.
That tension gives “turn and grip” its ethical force. To grip can mean to secure, restrain or claim control. A hand can turn an object while remaining constrained by it, much as social identities can be shaped and held by institutions, histories and inherited language. The screw does not offer a solved model of agency; it keeps force and dependence in the same frame. Its value lies in exposing the conditions under which connection becomes possible and the costs carried within it.
Mawimbi’s portfolio holds that instability at the centre of a materially varied practice. Sculpture, drawing, moving image, performance, sound and installation do not settle into a medium-specific answer; they pass the same questions through different systems. The selected works, biography, news and exhibition records form a living structure in which past gestures remain available for renewed attention. The archive does not freeze interpretation. It keeps the work open to another turn.
Explore the selected works and the documentation that surrounds them. Move between the sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation to encounter the screw as a working model of touch, tension and release, rather than as a fixed symbol. Biography, news and exhibition histories provide further routes into the practice, revealing how each inquiry develops through making, presentation and response.
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