Nöle Giulini

Wholly

November 8, 2024 – December 21, 2024
Closing Reception: December 21st from 10am to 4pm

Nöle Giulini’s Wholly brings together two distinct projects from the 1990s that redefine figuration: The Bodypuppets and Holy Socks. These sculptures explore the borders that separate the human body from negative space. Through that process, her works bear the imprint of a pseudo-human form, depicting angels, puppets, and archetypes. Their delicate interplay of line and form prompts an ontological inquiry:

Where does the body end and space begin? Or is it the other way around? How do you define a body? What are boundaries? How do we maintain and dissolve them and why? Where does nothing and something meet?

Discarded materials, such as trash, fruit peels, lint, and in this case used clothing and kombucha scoby, are Giulini’s primary medium. Through a collaborative process, these materials find their voices again and take on a second life. For Giulini, the societal divisions created by refusing these objects deserves questioning. “I am determined to love the flawed and deficient into the wholeness from which they originally separated,” she claims. Its not that there 1 is value in what others might consider trash, but rather that working with the rejected becomes a way of challenging value systems that created these designations in the first place. By listening to these items and transforming them into art, she participates in a kind of ethical world-building, a two-way exchange.

Her nine-minute long video from 1996, filmed outside her home and studio in Port Townsend, Washington, documents the kombucha fermentation process used to create The Bodypuppets. The video shows a tender sequence of sensual images documenting the artist pouring sand into tanks built into the ground and shaping the sand with her body to make a lifesize image. She then lines the mold with plastic sheeting, siphons in kombucha liquid, and after a period of time in the heated tank, a light-colored mucousy fungus in the shape of a figure is produced. The scoby—an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast—is a living byproduct of the fermentation process. Sometimes referred to as “the mother,” it is needed to grow more kombucha but is also a waste product. It has a thick, intestine-like quality and is a living membrane.

Once the scoby is nearly-dry and stabilized with natural resins such as Frankincense and Myrrh, its leathery pieces are sewn together and placed on an armature. The two Bodypuppets in this exhibition depict Angel Dunce and Kasper, figures based on archetypes from traditional German puppet theater with roots dating back to the 17th Century. Giulini refers to these objects as a protective layer or “skin I can wear.” As a thin barrier, it both fortifies and transforms the wearer, acting like a mask. In a previous exhibition text, Giulini quoted Simone Weil: “The prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.” That which separates us also connects us.

Once in their sculptural form, these materials may appear stable, but they remain living and hold within them the possibility for change. If fed with tea and sugar, the scoby will continue to ferment and grow. (In fact, while in storage over the past decades, these works offered their own sign of life, as they left the imprint of their own “breath” through a light fog residue on their glass casing.) The aforementioned video depicts not just the creation of the artworks in this exhibition but a care practice centered on attentiveness toward these living bodies.

Rather than being animated, The Bodypuppets are themselves animate. There is a vitality inherent to Giulini’s work; her patient, sensory attentiveness to living non-human material opens up possibilities for radical forms of kinship.

The kind of relationship to her material world built on an ethics of careful tending extends beyond her artistic work and into her way of navigating the world more broadly. Since 1988, Giulini has immersed herself in a meditative self-inquiry practice based on the teachings of Yoga Nidra and the Non-Dual Tradition. This investigation led her to formulate her own “Practice Of Welcoming,” a contemporary and practical form of these ancient methods that combines therapeutic techniques with creativity and play. Through this approach, she works with others, shepherding students and clients as they embody this notion of “welcoming” into their lives. In both this approach and her art practice, she espouses the same values of interconnectedness. These practices turn towards the difficult, the unwanted, the painful, the hole in the sock. It is in the rejected, dismissed, and abandoned aspects of life that the mystery speaks most clearly.

Giulini’s work relies on unexpected contrasts, holding conflicting ideas in a delicate symbiosis; they are refuse yet precious, objects yet animate, bodily yet nonhuman, a figure yet not figurative. Looking out over the large sculptural works are a hanging chorus of putti, Giulini’s Holy Socks from 1999. The artist sourced these materials–worn woolen socks–through anonymous newspaper ads that proclaimed “The holier the better!”, as well as from family, friends, and collection baskets in public locations. These sculptures hold a trace; we see a hole where a body once was. The negative space creates the form, rather than the other way around. In Giulini’s words, “Every hole is an offering—an invitation to partake of an emptiness crowded with our imagination.”

Giulini’s anthropomorphic sculptures hail our humanity. These are images of bodies that achieve their own affect—cheeky, surprising, scary. Their animus isn’t tied to their image but to the relation between body and material that created them. Astronomer Carl Sagan believed it was our ability to recognize and perceive others’ faces that created a stronger bond between infants and their caregivers, increasing their chance of thriving. To look for the human, or the human-like, in an object or entity is a method of survival. Giulini inverts this undertaking. For her, it is the non-human that is most alive, the most capable of showing us how to thrive. Giulini’s world is filled with vitality and devotion. Like a hymn, it vibrates a frequency of existence that connects us across time, space, and energy.

––Martha Joseph, 2024

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