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GHOST NETS, 2024

I am mesmerized by ghost nets: fishing nets that continue to trap animals and debris long after disuse. Animals get trapped, becoming bait for more animals, cycling on indefinitely.

My sculptures depict abandoned, low-tech, semi-functional objects that reveal a dependency on the ocean and awkward strategies to exploit it for one’s livelihood. These snares are made from, and accumulate discarded human contraptions including local trash, organic waste, donations, and thrift store finds.  Willow branches, rags, zip ties, camouflage and fish netting, colanders, rope, concrete, water bottles, shade screening, tar, sewing thread, wire cloche, plastic bags, plaster, grape vines, foam insulation, lamp shades, metal chains, and shoes are all used to cobble these pieces together to create traps that I modeled after the fish traps used on the television game show, Naked and Afraid.  

Suspending these sculptures in dry environments is intended to emphasize the well-meaning and futile gesture of potential capture. These works are named functional trap styles to emphasize the deliberate attempt at catching things.

 

Materials often relate to land-based hunting. The works are held together by orange zip ties, a color that deer cannot see but hunters can recognize for woodland safety. In another ineffective gesture, camouflage netting acts to both ‘conceal’ the traps core or crown and as a tangible, dangling dropping from the base of a trap.

 

These works also make an anthropomorphic nod to potential predators from the ocean I studied at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA. Viewing the jellies inspired the tentacled fabrics and strings. The luminescence of the jellies also acted as inspiration for lite elements in the works. The subtle interior light source acts simultaneously as heart-like or as another form of lure.

 

Bait Station offers a far more ominous insinuation. This dry-land trap suggests nefarious deeds. Like shoe trees found out in the middle of nowhere, these chained and dangling shoes are curious. Questions of both provenance and acquisition come from the size and shape of each shoe. Are these trophies? How does this trap work? Covered in tar and spiked with wire hangers, the function appears both self-evident and ineffective.

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© 2024-25 Katie Elizabeth Stubblefield

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