Chicken Wire Sculptures By Shi Jindian

Shi Jindian’s sculptures are made steel, yet they are light, transparent, almost ethereal. After searching for years for “a material that was brand new, completely untraditional”, he settled on steel wires. By trial and error, he learned how to crochet the two-dimensional strands into three-dimensional forms, using tools his own devising. His wire meshes start out as wrappings around some common object. When the mesh is complete, Shi Jindian destroys or extracts the object, leaving only its steel exoskeleton. The result, he says, is a kind fiction, a virtual reality that can be walked around and touched. Surrealist René Magritte painted a pipe along with the words: “This is not a pipe.” Shi Jindian does something similar in sculpture, making not-quite-replicas items from musical instruments to machines.
Chicken wire, or poultry netting, is a mesh wire commonly used to fence poultry livestock. It is made thin, flexible galvanized wire, with hexagonal gaps. Available in 1 inch (about 2.5 cm) diameter, 2 inch (about 5 cm) and 1/2 inch (about 1.3 cm), chicken wire is available in various wire gauges usually 19 gauge (about 1 mm wire) to 22 gauge (about 0.7 mm wire). Chicken wire is occasionally used to build inexpensive cages for flying animals, though the zinc content galvanized wire makes it inappropriate for gnawing animals such as parrots.