The right frame of mine for the artist is reached only when the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break.

The artists in this exhibition employ materials normally used in craft-such as fabric, thread, bricks, leaves, foam, pencils to enter into an activity that by repetitiveness and "hands on" engagement brings the mind to a spiritual level, a religious inspiiration, be it therapeutic as in Oliver Herring's knitting process or a dramatic act as in Madeleine Hatz's "building of a brick wall".

As in the practice of Zen, where flower arrangement, painting, archery, ete., are simply means of attaining higher awareness, the creative process of each of these artists transcends technique to become an "artless art" or a mystical exercise growing out of the Unconscious. (See Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel). The work is thus a metaphor for the act of transforming ordinary materials into living objects or beings.

This is, of course, the main difference between art and craft. Concerning itself with concept, symbol and sign, the former transcends its material actuality, while the latter is content to focus on its physical qualities.

In our digital age, where technology has become the main tool for many younger artists, the participants in Hands toWork, Mind to God wield implements normally utilized in craft-making and decorative arts, or even construction work. Throughout art history, stones have been engraved or paper cut out (Matisse). But by devoting themselves to such painstaking methods, the contemporary artists exhibited here achieve an exceptional formal integrity in their work.

Oliver Herring uses his form of knitting (with tape, Mylar, etc.) to come to terms with issues of desire, loss and healing. For Herring, the repetitiveness of the knitting process underscores the passage of time, both affirming life and reminding us of the inevitability of death (Starr Figura, "Projects at the Museum of Modern Art," 1996. ). Herring started as a painter and took up knitting taught to him by his mother) as a therapeutic activity when close friends in the art world passed away prematurely from AIDS. In dealing with intimate experiences like fear, suffering and grief, Herring turned to traditionally feminine practices as alternatives to the "fine arts" of paintings and sculpture. A solitary endeavor, knitting is traditionally undertaken out of the desire to comfort or protect a loved one. The knitted line-as in Big Round Flat (2001) in this exhibition-is endless, without a beginning or an end, like a circle. Every stitch is a measure of both commitment and time.

One of a hundred international artists invited to participate in the celebration of Israel's "Year of Peace," Herring staged a performance, staying from sunrise to sunset in a hole dug out of the earth in the desert. I was struck by a guote of the artist's diary: It was all very simple and pure and close to what I hoped it would be: a meditation on light as a metaphor for the duration of a life. I knit and that establishes a certain beautiful rhythm, which makes the situation of me knitting in here seem perfectly natural and in tune with my surroundings. I will name the performance Framed by Darkness. I enter in darkness, exit in darkness, and I concentrate on the day in between.

A long and intimate association of forest and cultural identity is the context into which Joan Backes inserts her installation Carpet of Leaves (2003). It is an Ode to the forest, like Emerson's "Woodnotes" or Thoreau's "The Maine Woods" (Jon Proppe "Essay in the Pathless Wood", 2003). Backes sets a Standard for how traditional media can be combined with conceptual approaches and installation techniques to produce a coherent whole. Carpet of Leaves evokes ecological issues without losing its focus on the aesthetic and personal experiences that reveal the artist's own fascination with and love for her subject. As the artist says: "The carpet of leaves that I made is inspired by those seen outside in the fail. By bringing real leaves from outside into the gallery and by preserving them, I want to remind us of their aesthetic beauty as well as environmental issues."

We can no longer hope to return, as Thoreau did, to Nature as though nothing had happened.Backes speaks of the diseases, often assisted by human meddling, that affect many trees in California and could spread to such valued types as the giant redwoods and sequoias.

This fulfills a doomsday scenario that Muiz wrote about in 1982 but probably only invented to scare others Into action. If it comes true now we are indeed in trouble. That may seem like a depressing prospect but it does not prevent us from finding our own way to approach and appreciate the woods that Thoreau knew.

Polly Apfelbaum has been gathering steam tor the past few years, making several large-scale floor installations of what has become her signature material and technique: hundreds of small pieces of crushed velvet, each cut out by hand, stained with fabric dye, and-as if that weren't enough-laboriously placed by the artist on the floor in highly organized 'washes' of color. "My work is improvisational, intuitive, process oriented, "Apfelbaum observes. "I want to see every possibility and then I'll make up my mind."

In a recent show at Triple Candie gallery in New York, her pieces strewn across a large open space looked like "fallen paintings," hybrid works of rare beauty that exists in a contentious, ambivalent space between painting, sculpture and installation.

As Apfelbaum says: "Working with given categories - painting/sculpture, wall/floor -my intention is not to attack or discrupt the finality of such categories, but rather to twist them into a different form. I am interested in structure and support, in flow and movement, in color and surface, in repletion and interval. In as much as context gives meaning, the hybrid is also a kind of misreading. It is about opening up rather than narrowing the possibilities. I work to leave room for what Walter Percy in his essay "Metaphor as Mistake" has called "misnamings, misunderstanding, or misrememberings" which, in each ase, have resulted in an authentic poetic experience.

In Red Dots (2000) velvet and dye are placed on cotton sheet, reminiscent of a quilt or delicate Byzantine mosaics. Weaving between the velvet dots is truly a hypnotic experience, as the shape and radical sculpture of the ellipse seems to draw you -quite physically -into its center (Terry R. Meyers for Artext No.70).

Madeleine Hatz's action of building a brick wall (using luminously colored bricks, each cast by hand by the artist, and mortar tinted blue) is a part of an extensive body of work consisting of painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, photography and video. The artist considers herself a "world nomad" and just as easily slips from one continent to another as from one media to another. This facilitates her search for a way to transcend cultural differences, and the bricklaying in particular serves as a metaphor for rebuilding our cultural human identity. Each color nuance is both extremely specific like the memory of a smell and ainıed towards universality.

One of Hatz's great inspirations is the llth century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The daily regimen for this nun (and later abbess) consisted of both extreme humility and ecstasy, as in her vision of building a cosmic center, a new city, with renewed persons who are the "stones" of this city.

Madeleine Hatz was invited to Leeuwarden, Holland, in 2000 to participate in a show titled "Public Interest." She erected ruined brick walls in the City Hall courtyard with convicts - Moroccan, Suriname, Friesian - many using tools and working for the first time in their lives. They were laying bricks, erecting walls, which could not possibly amount to a house or a structure. A "situation" had taken over the place.

When asked in an January 2001 interview: "What does 'Public Interest' mean to your development as an artist?," Hatz answered the following: For many years I worked isolated in the studio. I worked very intensely-I still do, by the way-and I had a huge production. I destroyed a lot of it and I didn't want to show it in the world outside the walls of the studio... At the moment I am in a stage where I am breaking the i sol ati on. Maybe the broken/ruined walls in Leeuwarden also have to do with that, an image of freedom and breaking out. Now I want to bring the audience into the studio and the studio out to the audience.

David Burrows creates his scenarios in a three -dimension- Al cartoon style from cutout multi-colored foam and rubber. In The Spirit Is Lo Salt (2003), a wall work made entirely from polyethylene foam elements, flowers look like fiery cartoon explosions or insect-eating plants, thus eliciting a response of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

"David Burrows makes eye-popping, 'foamtastic' installations that tell a story. Narrative in contemporary art is back with vengeance. Flowering splashes of color might at first appear to be Pop's answer to Monet's water lilies but may actually represent spilt booze after a wild party or spilt blood after a road accident in Burrow's world (Art Review, Dec. 2001).

"Burrows'material is non-committal about the texture it represents because it has a texture of its own, which means that liquids and solids, for instance, are rendered identically. Snow and cotton are cut out of the same sheet of white foam, as would a splash of water or a similarly colored flower... These Pollock-inspired blooms look more like the ambrosia splats on SM: fV in lurid greens, tomato ketchup red and mustard. Peculiar they may beput these vibrant scraps are a witty take on American abstract art." (The Guardian Guide, 2002)

Artist and writer Burrows links the visual with text. He wrote A Revised Dictionary of Received Ideas, an updated version for the 21st century of Gustave Flaubert's original dictionary of ideas, designed for those who wished to speak in great depth about a topic that they knew nothing about, so as to shine in intelligent society. for example, under the letter B, Burrows writes "Bubble-Gum (Bubbbell-ghum): The other of plastic. Bubble Gum is a substance that can take any form. Chewing bubble gum is small pleasure; an activity of absolutely no use, producing absolutely no nourishment whatsoever. Nether-the-less it is one of the most potent substances of the twentieth century for unlocking unconscious thoughts and desires. Noun." Under L, we find "Lower (Loh-err): 1. When fame and spectacle are welcome everywhere, then it is only something that is thought to be too low which can expect to stir hearts and minds. It is only that which is considered too low to be popular or unpopular that has a chance of getting a reaction. 2. Of course the low and the base are the secret fantasy of all high, popular, and mass, forms of culture.The only question is how low can someone go?"

Jo Mitchell's mesmerizing and exceptionally large cutouts made from either cardboard or plastic vinyl draw from different sources, such as Chinese characters, neo-Gothic script, Islamic patterns, pop-out logos, the sub cultural genres of graffiti and tattoo, the eloquent excesses of drag-strip and hot-rod car decoration. The words are often indecipherable amongst the printed calligraphic peaks and swirling lines of the images, which transform them into abstract entities. Mitchell's emphasis is on the style and form of these words, which become disconnected from their meaning. She uses words as objects, usually rendered as ornately embellished and overlapping paper and vinyl cutouts that are visually and stylistically onomatopoetic. The visual immediacy of the work belies the laborintensive process of its creation, which involves cutting out identical words from a chosen material and then spray-painting each in a different color. The cutouts are then layered, giving the images a sense of depth.

For Hands to Work, Mind to God Mitchell created LIVE METAL -taking words, patterns and motifs from various sources and weaving them into a composition that embraces visual design along with a suggestion of lifestyle declaration/obsession. The word "Metal" is taken from a heavy metal magazine; depicted in a gothic typeface it is loaded with sub cultural references. However it carries a more ornate, internal fretwork (reminiscent of decorated texts) that diffuses the content and its imnediate reading. The word "LIVE," derived from a bold/standard typeface acts more as a sign, although it is half inverted, confusing the reading between LIVE and EVI L. It references the myth that songs of that genre played backwards carry hidden messages, as well as acting out a more traditional form of textual pun. These two sculptural elements, hand cut from layers of card, will be hung vertically in a perspectival composition and set within a floor-to-ceiling triangular wall-painting. This painting fuses the geometry of more traditional Islamic patterns with Pop/Op abstraction and places the textual dynamics within an overall design.

As Mitchell points out, the image-sign in her work is a departure point for her interest in language/text and shifts in meaning when visual/formal aesthetics conıe into play.

Whether in giant wall drawings (as in his recent show at Delfina in London) or small-sized drawings on paper in Hands to Work, Mind to God, Haluk Akakçe's pictorial surface is a petri dish of genetic code, an endlessly self-replicating double helix of signifying strands. Woven tracery, as nuanced and various as the crystal lattice structure of a snowflake, trail off into bands of undulating calligraphy.

"With a background in the corporate and architectural worlds, Akakçe is a child of the digital revolution, who works in a broad range of media, effortlessly moving from low-tech drawing to wall-painting. His lines spin out arabesques so fine-tuned and sustained in their rhythms that they seem to be executed without the pen ever leaving the page." (Holland Cotter, New York Times)

"Akakçe's drawings are, in some sense, perfect examples of what we think digitally designed images should look like. Fluid, morphing, light and fast, his lines mark out bulbous and sinewy forms against high contrast backgrounds of blood red and beige. The drawings are slick and so professionally finished they nıight be TV animation cells. Most have a central figüre: a hunıan ör cyborg form (usually somehow teminine) set in quiet standoff against a more abstract arrangenıent of techno doodles. Often the figures are appended with tubes and prosthetic attachments that evoke Aubrey Beardsley as much as David Cnonenberg. Such anıbiguous use of peri od imagery - the Victorian vs. the Futuristic, Art Nouveau vs. Cyberpunk - may be the defining feature of Akakçe's drawings. If not, it's certainly the most contemporary." (Bennett Simpson for Artext, No. 70.)

In the section called "Theory" in The Spiritual in Art (1910), Wassily Kandinsky makes this poignant observation: "A very simple gesture, whose aim is unknown, evokes by itself the effect of an important, mysterious and solemn movement. This lasts as long as one is unaware of the exterior, practical reason for this movement, it acts, then, as a pure resonance. In a simple movement, with no exterior motive, there is an endless source of possibilities."

This is part of what Kandinsky called "a really pure art form, to serve the divine."

Elga Wimmer