Four Corners

Winsor worked four full days a week for six months to construct Four Corners. At the core of the work is a simple square made of four two-foot-long logs, joined with invisible notches and painstakingly bound together by the artist with thousands of feet of twine that she had unraveled from strands of weathered rope. She wrapped, bound, and knotted the twine around the wooden frame, transforming its geometry into an eccentric form of enormous density, weight, and textural and linear intricacy. The artist believed that the process of making the work—and her role in that process—were critical to its success.

In a New York Times review of Winsor’s 1979 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Hilton Kramer noted a connection between the artist’s work, “with its attachment to ritual and pre-industrial modes of workmanship,” and what was then called “primitive”:

“There is a yearning in [Winsor’s] work for the kind of meaning that the sculpture in a primitive culture could take for granted: the meaning that derives from a traditionally ordained ritual function. It is in this yearning that the true significance of Jackie Winsor’s sculpture lies—a yearning that attempts to convert the slick forms of Minimalism back into the language of primitive feeling. The poignancy of the work is to be found in the fact that the only rituals available to the sculpture in this task are the rituals of esthetic ratiocination.”

Ellen Johnson, in her catalogue essay for the 1979 exhibition, seemed to concur with Kramer’s response:

“The whole slow process Winsor likened to a ritual long before that reference became so hackneyed. The earlier all-rope series she had executed entirely alone, but the bound-log pieces grew too large and heavy for one person to handle…In the rope pieces Winsor joins hands, as it were, with the original makers and users of the twisted hemp. Such a notion would not, I think, be scoffed at by Winsor inasmuch as she actually invites spectators to bring their own associations to their understanding of her work.”