String works

Made with String and tension

Both transparent and solid, Prince’s site-specific string installations address the circular nature of life while toeing the line between drawing and sculpture. The seemingly simplistic aesthetic evokes a personal search for each viewer leading toward introspection.

Energy Altar is an interdisciplinary installation and performance incorporating string, gouache paintings, bay boughs, and candles. Over the course of a single evening, participants wrote something they wished to release onto bay leaves. Prince quietly received, read, and burned each offering, transforming private intentions into a shared moment of reflection, care, and letting go. Curated by Cole Devoy with Method Gallery at The Coliseum Theater, Seattle, WA 2023.

The second installation of Spinning Lines was created for HOWL with a community of non-binary and female-identifying people and allies. Prince also created and performed the corresponding durational performance, Ruts of Repetition (RoR), multiple times daily. Additionally, Amy Funbuttons joined Prince for the first day of performances as well as the final RoR performance. All culminated in a final performance where Funbuttons and Prince we immersed in the installation for the last hour or until collapse. Curated by Lele Barnett and Amanda Manitach with Forest For the Trees at the RailSpur Building, Seattle, WA 2022. Photos by Sami Khoury and Kelly O.

This first installation of Spinning Lines was created with volunteers from my community for the group exhibition, If You See Nothing, Say Something at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, NY 2010.

Writings on the Wall (a memoir) (2009, gouache on artist-cut Rives BFK, 96 × 84 inches (two panels)) is an ephemeral work created in response to the installation Writings on the Wall. For this piece, Prince cut two large sheets of paper and painted through the string structure using gouache, recording the space, movement, and scale of the original installation. The resulting work functions as a material trace—an intimate document of the installation’s presence and duration.

In 2009 I created Writings on the Wall, placing nails down the two sides of the selected installation site from top to bottom, then carefully wound string between the nails. Occasionally a string would slip off the nail and I would leave the loose loop to “float” and be bound-in among the string lines behind and in front of it. This art piece is about how the future and the past give equally clear signs when a situation is going to become very difficult or unpleasant but when you are in the midst of it there is nothing to be done. See Writings Converged, the inspired collaboration with choreographer Arron Rachel Masters.