Emilie
Ding

Like Hugh Ferriss, the engineer and draftsman who for many years analyzed the development of New York at the start of the last century, Emilie Ding nowadays does her work on the theme of construction, at the point where engineering and drawing meet. Fascinated by the technical side of construction, by the systems for distributing forces which are put in place in a piece of architecture as it goes up in order to stabilize it, Ding has found in engineering’s formal language a way to radically conjure up those tensions and balances. She takes a keen interest in the massive structures that result from buildings – pylons, routes, bracings, and buttressing structures – and focuses on the formal possibilities that architecture offers, responding to them with forms made of concrete, steel, and felt, midway between sculpture and construction, representation and function. Employing a minimalist idiom, she sometimes seems to take a page from Arte povera in her choice of materials while at other moments flirts with the brutalist esthetic. Vis-à-vis the monumental structures she is able to create in the space of an exhibition gallery, the geometrical drawings she executes in graphite display a radical tenacity that is in no way diminished by the medium she employs.