Untitled (S.864, Wall-Mounted Tied-Wire, Open-Center, Six Branched Form Based on Nature)

"Equally provocative are Asawa's tied-wire sculptures...These forms, which either hang from the ceiling or are mounted on the wall, were based on the binary branching design of the skeleton of a desert plant that Asawa's friends Paul and Virginia Hassel brought to her in 1962. Unable to make a two-dimensional drawing of the plant that satisfied her, Asawa shaped it in wire to understand its structure and then found that she was able to render its form more easily." (D. Cornell, "The Art of Space: Sculptural Installations" in The Sculptures of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, exh. cat., San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 2006, p. 199.)