Artist Anne Hardy on the work of Collection artist Margaret Organ, whose work features in Towner Art Gallery’s latest National Partners exhibition, The Weather Garden: Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection.
In the late 1970s, Margaret Organ (b. 1946) began to create a unique body of work by layering paper onto shaped wire, making expressive abstract works that occupied both walls and floor. Organ talks about seeking out a soft material that had sympathy with her ideas, unlike the more traditional hard materials that were more common in sculpture at the time, ‘With just one sheet of paper, there is so much potential, more than I ever discovered in anything else‘[1].
In photographs of these works their delicate forms seem to balance precariously in space; leaning against one another, resting against walls, and in corners, in ways that suggest they could collapse at any moment, Organ commented that, ‘I consider the strength of my work to be in its gentle quality. Gentleness in sculpture is invariably far stronger that the aggressive facade of work which has an overt strength’[2].
Organ has said that her works come about through ‘wanting to reach a particular set of relationships’[3] and has spoken about the strong emotional and physical relationship she has with her work, 'Everything seems to be dependent on me, and in the Loop piece it was very much about how wide my arms would stretch, and the height is always to do with my own field of vision, or just my size.’[4]
