Taking a biomimetic approach to material, the artist weaves, gathers, and unravels strands of wire rope to form bundles of unnatural fiber. Splintering crafts sheaf-like organic forms from industrial materials in a prescient look towards the future in the Age of the Anthropocene.

In 1981 Hassinger was invited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to make work for a solo exhibition in their Gallery Six, a small grotto-like space tucked away in the bowels of the Museum. Hassinger approached the opportunity with some skepticism at this early stage in her career, finding the Museum context problematic as an artist whose practice championed the ephemeral in order to challenge societal values. Her response to the invitation was a modular installation titled On Dangerous Ground. Modular, understood as a single motif that repeated until it filled the space but was also temporary. Creating a natural environment from industrial man-made materials, spiky wire rope, Hassinger’s title references not only the threatening physical nature of the work but her own precarious position as an artist and woman of color. According to the artist, “the construction of these bushes (in their dissolution of form and their tumultuous placement) reflects the turmoil of contemporary urban reality where one feels a sense of confusion – a decline in the order of things, a profound sense of loss, vulnerability, and lack of “centeredness.” There’s a lot of diversity, but no divinity.” Splintered Starburst recreates one of the elements of the original installation now destroyed.