On Saturdays Asawa attended a Japanese language school where she learned the aesthetic discipline needed to execute calligraphy. This distinctive writing system is marked by expressive characters, yet in Asawa’s studies order and repetition were stressed over creativity. Understanding the possibilities and variations held within a single symbol consequently impacted the expansive experimentation that Asawa sought in crocheting wire. She commented, “The crochet loop is like an e. You begin by looping a wire around a wooden dowel, then making a string of e’s, always making the same e loop. You can make different size loops depending on the weight of the wire and the size of the dowel. You can loop tight and narrow or more open and loose. The materials are simple. You can use bailing wire, cooper wire, brass wire. We used whatever we had.” Besides focused character study, calligraphy taught Asawa the importance of the empty space around the brushstrokes and the overall sculptural environment that it created. She noted, “When you’re working in calligraphy, you’re not watching what your brush is doing, but you’re watching the spaces around it. You’re watching what it isn’t doing, so that you’re taking care of both the negative space and the positive space.”
Understanding the possibilities and variations held within a single symbol consequently impacted the expansive experimentation that Asawa sought in crocheting wire.
Her studies at Black Mountain College further engaged these concepts, influencing her decision to incorporate the space surrounding her artworks as she made them. Courses in color, design, drawing, and watercolor with Josef Albers stressed the importance of understanding materials, noticing relationships, and respecting both positive and negative space. Problem solving and perspective were underscored, along with the idea of transparency. Asawa explained, “It was Albers’s word. I liked the idea, and it turns out my sculpture is like that. You can see through it. The piece does not hide anything. You can show inside and outside, and inside and outside are connected. Everything is connected and continuous.” The idea of a continuous form was something that Albers felt was particularly necessary when working with line. In his intensive drawing classes he focused on the relationship between line and form, and allowing one line to create volumes by doing more with less. Asawa would later see her crocheted wire sculptures as accomplishing just that.
The environment at Black Mountain encouraged experimentation, and this pervasive spirit allowed the disciplined and focused Asawa to try her hand at sculpture in spring of 1948, her last year at Black Mountain. She studied with some of the most important figures of the 20th century including Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Jean Varda, and Ilya Bolotwosky. Black Mountain was a close community where the faculty and students ate and spent free time outside of class together. During Asawa’s three years there the visiting faculty rotated to include John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Trude Guermonprez, and Jacob Lawrence.
These interwoven layers and penetrating volumes left both inner and outer elements exposed with no apparent beginning and end.
It was in this charged creative climate that Asawa began what would become her most celebrated works. With a single wire she crocheted basket forms that soon turned upside down and hung from the ceiling. She quickly complicated them by building several shapes upon each other. Airy and transparent, soon spheres filled with smaller woven volumes, nested within them. These interwoven layers and penetrating volumes left both inner and outer elements exposed with no apparent beginning and end. Asawa combined the discipline from her childhood on a farm, the biomorphic shapes from her daydreams, the possibilities in a single form, the relationship between negative and positive space, the continuity of a linear surface, and a single crocheted loop to challenge and redefine what sculpture, and what a single line can accomplish.
