Tubular Telecom Wire Telepathics

My exhibition for Sausage Gallery brings together as many of my weavings made from telecom wire as possible, compressed into the gallery’s wonderfully tight tube-like “banger” space. These works resemble infinitely meandering, squishable intestines. The word curate refers not only to arranging objects in a gallery, but also to curing and preserving food, so the exhibition resonates with the pickling of cyber sausages.

I extract copper, tin, and multicoloured plastic-coated wires from above- and below-ground telecom conduits and weave them into what I think of as bodies-without-organs-without-bodies-without-organs. Underground cabling, especially the thickest diameters, contains the widest range of colours, sometimes including the rare purple wires. My “tele-sausages” are hollow, semi-transparent forms made from cybernetic, energetic and telepathic vector mesh full of air.

I was recently invited to create a catalogue raisonné of my tele-weavings, for what purpose exactly is unknown. At the same time, the possibility of an exhibition at Sausage Gallery made me realise how many of these works are, in fact, quite sausage-like: bulbs, umbilical cords, cylindrical alien skins of the fingers that wove them, plump DNA spirals, unicorn horns, pods, serpentines, spines, brains, nerves and ganglion, tentacles, tendrils, breath conduits, oesophaguses, elongated limbs, tele-phallic and post-phallic polymorphs, clitoris nerve bundles, asthmatic lungs, orifices and expanding or contracting links that become many forms other than just cylinders. This realisation made me feel suddenly old—I have been weaving with telecommunications wire since 1992.
Not all of these works have survived. A brown cone with bird wings disappeared from an art school exhibition before it could be purchased. A purple headpiece mapping Emotive EEG sensor locations, topped with a large twisting DNA-spiral unicorn horn, was lost on George Street in Chinatown while en route to the Riga Triennial, forcing me to quickly weave an identical replacement. Three very early works are also missing: a crude red heart-shaped blob, an open yellow spiral, a green slime-mould form, and a white-and-black frill with dangling tentacles attached to a drilled buffalo horn. Buffalo horn is materially similar to fingernails—the very tools that manipulate the wire—so I am particularly sad to have misplaced or lost that spectacular piece, like a shark’s fin rising from a jellyfish.

I have sold very few weavings. The first sale, Persephone’s Flame, sold to the head of art theory during my second year of art school, was deeply confusing and traumatic for me; as an oversensitive, anti-capitalist artist, I cringe at the idea of making objects simply to sell. And I wasn’t sure I had finished it, but curator Alex Danko encouraged me to show it. Shortly after, the same work was selected as a finalist in the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship when I was 20 years old, but I was barred from the exhibition gallery it due to a bizarre and possibly unfounded technicality around my art school enrolment in the ACT and voting registration in NSW, and after a long drive back to Canberra the work returned to the art historian’s wall. A few years later, while beginning my PhD, I was strongly advised not to seek gallery representation, and now more than twenty years after completing my thesis I remain unrepresented and without tenure into my fifties. However, I have continued weaving, making art, and sustaining myself, including putting food, and the occasional sausage, into my intestines.

Along the way I have become a bona fide world expert in artistic telepathics. This year I will have nine new short texts published in a book From Artbrain.org to Activist Neuroaesthetics: Thirty Years of Transindividuation, Transversality and Planetarity. I have just – finally – translated Pascal Rousseau’s 100, 000 word book Cosa Mentale: Art and Telepathy in the 20th Century (2015) which references my thesis several times, literally, and I am humbled that it appears to owe a lot to my own thesis Telepathy in Contemporary, Concept and Performance Art (2005) and ongoing research, whilst also giving me and contemporary art history a lot more telepathic-aesthetic food for thought. I have come to understand that weaving telecom wire creates a primitive radio: coiled wire generates Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) signals, sometimes used to explain psychic and supernatural phenomena. Everything has an energy frequency, but wires—even “dead” ones—are especially suited to telecommunication, and to telepathic communication through their estrangement from everyday utilitarian function. And I now understand telepathics to operate in all art, writing and culture.

My fascination with telecom wire began in my childhood at Bathurst, watching workers manipulate cables above and below concrete and earth. I would collect stiff coloured bristles left on the pavement, sculpt and draw with them, and imagine making vast wire worlds and beings—my wired imagination gave me my first experience of virtual reality. In art school, after acquiring a large bundle of wire from Canberra’s Revolve recycling facility, weaving with telecom wire became a core practice of artistic telepathics that I return to again and again alongside the telepathics I cultivate in painting, sculpture, architecture, installation, video, performance, photography, virtual worlding, brain-computer interfaces, drawing, dressmaking, writing, printmaking and more.
My weavings consciously resonate with yet contradict theosophical Thought Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, discovered in the Canberra School of Art library in 1992, alongside the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on nerves and psychic formations, all of which I literally incorporated into early and ongoing paintings and weavings and artworks. Although I refer to these tele-things as weavings, my unusual technique is more akin to something in between lace-making, netting, basket-making, fascinator construction and cyborg punk recycling. And the process can involve tuning out to telemedia and being quite meditative, or tuning in and weaving with the television on – options!

Fun fact: sausage-dog owners often report that their dogs display telepathy, knowing exactly when food—especially sausages—is being prepared.

For copies of my newly authored telecom wire weaving catalogue raisonné or to purchase or to discuss the possibility of commissioning a new weaving, please contact
Jacquelene Drinkall via  EMAIL – CLICK HERE.