Elise Love- McCorkle

Since 2021, love-mccorkle has practiced low-cost and sustainable artistic creation by reusing her materials, using spare or leftover supplies provided by the art spaces in which she has worked, and by repurposing items that she finds set out on the sidewalk.

Before the pieces in the herd path series came to exist as textile works, they were failed paintings from 2023 that she had tried, unsuccessfully, to salvage by segmenting and reassembling them using scissors and contact glue. Until earlier this year, they sat in a corner of her studio, rolled up.

After spending a week in January tailoring her wardrobe—she often alters her clothing, as, since 2021, she has purchased very few items first-hand—she began reimagining these failed paintings as materials.

Rather than seeing these works as products, as an interdisciplinary artist, love-mccorkle understands them as assemblies of her practice—parts that functionally contribute to a cohesive study, to a larger processing machine. To fasten these assemblies together, the components she has used are fully threaded bolts secured with nuts.