The Queue: Windy Chien

Has your experience in the world of music carried over into your art career?

Yes. My time at the record store—14 years—was very DIY, very punk rock, deep in the underground music world. What that taught me was a healthy distrust of institutions, and a trust in myself, that I can make things happen. So I’ve been very DIY about my art career as well. I intentionally do not work with galleries because the way the numbers work doesn’t work for me. I’m very good at representing myself. I’m very good at DIYing. So I’ve been able to forge this very successful art career in my fifties, which is amazing to me. 

What is it about knots that fascinates you?

What distinguishes a knot from a tangle is intentionality, right? If there is intentionality, that’s human, and I think of knots as artifacts of human ingenuity. In fact, I find knots to be marvels of design. In every knot, the line—the cordage—enters, becomes the knot, and then exits it. But within that, there is so much variety possible. There are almost 4,000 knots in the world, and so you can imagine that there’s a whole taxonomy of them—families and subfamilies. And I’m such a nerd—I love that kind of table-of-the-elements stuff. 

By the end of the year of knots, I was fluent in what I now call the universal language of knots. And once you’re fluent in a language, you can speak, you can sing, you can write poetry, and you can tell stories.

How has your work evolved over the years?

In the early days, I worked in only one color at a time. What makes each knot unique is the journey of the line, and I wanted to remove all of the other elements so that the viewer would see that it was about the line, so for about the first seven years of my practice, [I used] only one color at a time. However, in the past couple of years, I’ve come to feel like I’ve said my piece and made my point about the line, so now I’m really embracing multiple colors.

What doesn’t change is my fidelity to the material. If I need to make a piece that holds a lot of weight, I’m going to pick the knot that will hold a lot of weight. I know, because I’m fluent in the language of knots. I let the knots tell me what they want to become, and then I fit the project or the commission around that. For me, the focus is always on the knots and cordage, what they will and won’t do, and from there can spring an entire body of work.

Who are some of the artists who have inspired or influenced you?

How long do we have? There are so many. But two who gave me a path to follow in my early days, my two favorite artists in the world, are Ruth Asawa and Sheila Hicks, both of whom started working in fiber of different types in the ’60s or earlier. Ruth’s best-known work, of course, is with wire. But wire is a type of line, just like wool or linen thread is a type of line. 

One of the things I love about Sheila and Ruth is that they made monumentally sized work. They took women’s work out of the living room, and into places where people are there to look at it—fine-arts institutions, for example. And to do that, they went big—as awe-inspiring as possible. I love the example they set.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.