Using unraveled rope as a sculptural medium, Janaina Mello Landini creates intricate art inspired by branches. Cleverly titled Ciclotramas—a combination of the words “cycle” and trama, a Latin weaving term—the series of rope installations transforms an ordinary and overlooked material into an eye-catching artistic tool.
Most of Landini's Ciclotrama sculptures are composed of a single piece of colorful rope attached to a canvas. By meticulously unbraiding certain sections of the twisted cord, the artist creates a complex network of intertwining branches. These tangled offshoots twist and turn, resulting in web-like patterns reminiscent not only of trees and roots, but of diverging veins and tributaries.
In addition to these wall hangings, she also creates large-scale, site-specific installations that adorn ordinary spaces with systems of spiderwebs. These pieces often employ more than one piece of rope, and are less symmetrical and more organic than her two-dimensional art.
To the artist, the unconventionality of the material used in each Ciclotrama is just as important as the complexity of its aesthetic. She explains on her website: “The rope used is an object of the everyday world, only transformed by the action of undo and redo—unroll, divide and twist—and the time spent in this process is imprinted on the organic body of Ciclotramas.”
Artist Janaina Mello Landini unravels colorful rope to create complex networks of branches.
Called Ciclotramas, each work of rope art demonstrates the surprising possibilities of the everyday material.
Janaina Mello Landini: Website | Instagram
h/t: [Colossal]
All images via Janaina Mello Landini.
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