Excerpt from catalog essay for Awakenings, a group exhibition at Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002
By Kate Hackman, Director of Art in the Loop and Assistant Director of the Charlotte Street Foundation

Each graphite-coated wire, each shaped and smoothed bit of wood, each tiny drill hole, and each careful stitch of Kansas City artist Anne Lindberg's installation is a record of time and process in service to a larger scheme. As such, one might best describe hers as a cumulative approach, whereby every part, while its own index, is dependent upon this larger matrix to produce its desired effect. While Lindberg's reads in some ways like "mini exhibition" of several seemingly discrete works, these individual components were conceived specifically for this exhibition and gallery space. As such, one should understand them as integrally related components whose relation to site and one another is of central importance.

Emerging from thousands of minute holes in two adjacent white walls is breathing, a 42-foot undulating wave of wooden-tipped steel wires. Intuitively, one feels the mass as an embodiment of motion, with the weight of smooth pine dowels drawing the wires down, forcing them to bend earthward according to laws of gravity. In this elegant, elemental manner, Lindberg renders the essence of a trajectory, the arc of an energy expenditure, the exhalation of a breath. As our eyes move from a wire's point of origin to its elongated tip, and, incrementally, across a spectrum of shades of wood, from black to blond to bone-white, we find ourselves amidst a process of, indeed, awakening--with subtle gradations registering the course of our journey. That the wires resemble graphite marks and the dowels evoke simplified writing tools enhances the work's resonance as an embodiment of flow. As if witnessing the creation of a 3-dimensional drawing, we are at once privy to the mark, the action of mark-making, and the instrument that made it--the memory of a gesture rendered tangible.

breathing reflects Lindberg's search for common patterns among a wide range of organic forms and processes, both micro and macroscopic. A cloud of dust particles, a vastly magnified scalp of hair follicles, groping fingers, a swarm of insects, a marsh of wind- and water-swept reeds or grasses are but a few of the images evoked. Yet less significant than a resemblance to any one of these things is the allusion to all simultaneously, hinting again of essential forces, of the very nature of movement and growth.

A series of three mendings nearby reiterate the repetitive, labor intensive, even obsessive quality of Lindberg's practice. Again we see small gestures in service of a larger goal as minute stitches of silvery thread knit themselves into elliptical formations. And again, beginning with thousands of tiny punctures in the skin of her working surface--in this case birch plywood panels--Lindberg penetrates that skin, drawing it into an intimate dialogue. A humble process bound to tedious, domestic chores, her act of "mending" evinces the power of nurture. A tender healing of wounded surfaces, it ultimately sews the likeness of a womb or a nest, again and again, as if inevitably.

Hackman Essay.pdf