For example, Cat's Cradle and Threads incorporate images of babies excised from familiar and comforting contexts and inserted into disquieting and alienating spaces. In Cat's Cradle, the incubator that sustains the newborn infant is suspended by taut white lines across a dense black background. Extracted from the environment of a hospital room, the photographic fragment recalls Nabokov's opening words in Speak, Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss..." Likewise, Friedberg selected the sleeping child in Threads from a photograph of an urban street scene. Removed from its quotidian landscape, the child seems excruciatingly vulnerable, its head, legs, and stroller extending beyond an enframing white geometric field into a large black arena. Horizontal lines, which at once suggest support and entrapment, run across the entire composition. Friedberg seems to have created the lines by laying a series of strings across her composition before applying the black encaustic skin. The strings were then torn through the paint layer and reaffixed to the surface in loose arabesques. The white lines appearing from behind the black wax plot the trajectory of a grid - the regular frame against which imposed irregularities are measured. The strings, incased in black wax, provide disruptions in the linear regularity, indexes of process, and poignant containments for the seemingly trapped child.