Artist Prompt: Taking Space and Making It into a Place

Taking Space and Making It into a Place 
Designed by Andrea Moreau 

This artist prompt is based on a Saturday Studio on the Farm workshop offered in partnership with Common Ground Farm. 

Photo: Eva Deitch

Introduction 
In 1989 the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston published a booklet by Fred Sandback entitled Children’s Guide to Seeing. In it, Sandback writes about his process of using knitting yarn to “take space and make it into a place—a place that people will move around in and be in.” The space that Sandback used for his yarn sculptures was the space of the museum or gallery, but we can take his idea and use it to activate our own spaces. 

Before you begin, think about what it means to take “space” and make it into a “place.” What is the difference between space and place? There’s no right answer to this question, but the way I imagine it, a space is something big and open and without a specific purpose, and a place is something that has been designed to be used or inhabited in a certain way. 

Outdoors 
For this exercise, you will need several rolls of colorful, trail-marking ribbon, yarn, or string and a space where there are sturdy trees and bushes. 

Begin unrolling your colorful material choice and use it to draw lines in space, tying it to tree branches and stretching it to connect to other branches or letting it drape and hang.   

Experiment with what kinds of lines you can make with the material. Can you wrap it around the tree branches to make an enclosure or fort? Can you make a frame through which to look at the sky? You can weave, wrap, drape, or tie your material. You can make stripes or curtains or walls.  

When you are finished, you can invite other people to explore your place or you can keep it all to yourself. If you are working outside, make sure to leave the space exactly how you found it. 

Indoors 
For this exercise, you don’t need any special materials, but you will have to be resourceful and use what you have around your house. 

Think of spaces in your house that are open and undefined and that can be turned into places. The area under a kitchen or dining room table is a common space. An unused corner of a room might be another good space. How about under your bed? Explore your house and identify any spaces that look like they could be turned into places. 

Once you’ve found a good space, you’ll need to think about what kind of place you want to create. Will it be simple or will it have lots of decorations? Will it be a place where you can be alone or with others? Will it be well lit for reading a book, or should it be dark for napping? Make a list of all the qualities that your place should have. 

Next, find the objects around your house that will enable you to turn your space into a place. Some good building materials are books, sheets, blankets, sofa cushions, chairs, yarn, string, cardboard, tape, paper, clothespins, and binder clips. 

Stack, lean, attach, tie, and clip your materials to define the edges of your place. It can have walls or not. It can have a ceiling or canopy or not. It can have a door or not. The design is entirely up to you.  

We would like to see your creations and add a selection of them to the blog. Please share images of your work by emailing submissions@diaart.org.  

Andrea Moreau is a visual artist living and working in Beacon, New York. She was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Drawing and she regularly exhibits at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York. Moreau is an arts educator at Dia Beacon and teaches in the foundations department at the State University of New York, New Paltz.