Christy Georg "Untitled (Sailor's Saddle)"

This is Christy Georg. I'm an artist-adventurer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I started this piece while artist-in-residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico back in 2010, where I began a new body of work exploring parallels between sailors and cowboys.

I was making cowboy accoutrements made from sailors' materials, and vice versa - sailor things made of cowboy stuff. I had spent the prior few years creating my large “Nautical Body” of sculpture, drawings, video, etc. That was born out of living and working aboard large sailing schooners and my own small sloop. And that was born from spending a year, oh-so-far from the sea, in the desert, at the year-long Roswell Artist-in-Residence program. [in 2005]

So this sculpture, this ridiculous, beautiful, non-functional saddle, is made entirely of decorative sailors' knots. Rather labor-intensive and rather challenging technically, or so my knotwork students have told me, conceptually it redacts usefulness… instead celebrating design, objecthood, and materiality.

Did you smell it? Aah, the unmistakable smell of real pine tar, a natural preservative for ropes and rigging in the Age of Sail.