Santa Fe–based artist Sylvie Baumgartel creates unique knitted sculptures inspired by carnivorous plants, sea urchins, termites, and strange topographies. In her art, antique furniture, ancient text pages, and a global tradition of practical and ornamental hand craft merge with nature’s weirder wonders and take the form of sprouts, seeds, blossoms, tubers, and polyps. Baumgartel’s work has been exhibited at box gallery in Santa Fe.
I could claim to be solving topological knot theory equations through the knitted form or dueling the legacy of Louise Bourgeois, but there’s really no overarching intellectual or artistic quest behind my work. I was at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium staring at the anemones and thought, “I want to knit that.” I wasn’t a dexterous enough knitter at the time, and it took a couple years to acquire the skills to attempt reproducing such forms. Now I make all kinds of growths and specimens, reliquary-ish, like Victorian mourning art. I think of them as molds, fungi, overgrown, bacterial, untamed. I give them traditional Latin botanic names as homage to my mother who dragged me into the mountains on most summer weekends as a child and made me memorize all the wildflowers by both their common and Latin names. The names to me are very important, for their archaic beauty and absurdity, for the inexorable entanglement of form with language. Knitting is about agitation for me. It’s not relaxing or meditative; rather it fuels a fire. The craft is at the center, and the art is peripheral, parenthetical.
