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Fossa (2016)
Graphite on paper
55 ¼ x 47 in.

Cutler’s 2016 graphite drawing Fossa poignantly realizes this notion. Inspired by the photographs of Darius and Tabitha Kinsey, a married couple who documented the Pacific Northwest lumber industry in the early twentieth century, this work imagines a community of women living inside massive, hollowed-out tree trunks. To sustain their existence, all of the women are in some way involved in the critical labor of producing and utilizing the ropes of hair that connect the trees and their denizens. Hair became a prominent motif in Cutler’s oeuvre after she visited a Buddhist temple built in 1602 in Kyoto, Japan, where ropes made from the hair of female devotees were used to move materials when the structure was rebuilt following a late-nineteenth-century fire.
—Karin Campbell