Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Complex Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Two Interior Spheres), 1955 (refabricated 1957–58)

Narrator: Ruth Asawa made sculptures like this one by looping wire, a technique that she learned on a trip to Mexico City in 1947. 

Ruth Asawa: That’s where I learned to knit and to knit with wire.

If you take material you like to know how far you can take it from what it’s traditionally known to do. You find that you can go from two dimensions to three dimensions, that interests me. It can be any material. It doesn’t have to be wire.  It’s just that that happens to be material that I use. And I think that is important. That you take an ordinary material like wire and you give it a new definition. That’s all. I’m interested in what it can do by itself, that’s what excites me. 

Narrator: The Archives of American Art recorded this oral history with Asawa in 2002. 

[Oral history interview with Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier, 2002 June 21-July 5. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.]