Sample text
Introduction
The
following text was written as a series of reflections on materials, sculptures
and images developing within my studio as I worked towards my recent exhibition
‘Isthmus’. The intention was to find
ways to write through the artworks and materials themselves, thinking of the
text as a series of dialogues; to imagine the voices of the materials and
objects within the studio - all of which have differing geological, industrial,
technological, imaginative relations with the fenland landscape. The text integrates descriptions of sculptures
and the materials that constitute them, methodologies that explore
possibilities for establishing forms of embodied relation with animal and
mineral entities within the landscape, and reflections on the poetics of the
processes employed.
Stacy Alaimo
writes that we must think “as the stuff of the world” (Alaimo, 2014, 13), in
order to grapple with the unsettling agencies of ordinary objects and
materials. The text and the artworks that accompany it reflect a response to
this provocation, rooted in feminist, postcolonial and environmental
epistemologies that critique modes of knowing that “install a gap between the
subject and the object of knowledge” (Alaimo, 2014, 14). The process is speculative, extending from exploration of the
possibilities for establishing forms of intimacy outside the frame of shared
language. In this context communication becomes sensual, embodied, affectual;
expressed through touch, smell, sounds, rhythm and through
imagined proximity.
Returning
rhythmically to elements within the studio, the method of writing is episodic,
so that what emerges is grounded in an unfolding engagement with the process of
making sculptural and video works. The text can be thought
of as a kind of script in which the protagonists range from the mineral
Sylvite, formed from the compressed skeleta of
microorganisms that inhabited a warm Jurassic
ocean that covered the Fenland landscape; to the bodies of European eels, a
critically endangered species that were once so numerous in the fens that they
were exchanged in the tens of thousands as currency; to the voice of Winnifred,
my great grandmother, who spent a number of years living in Swavesey, a fenland
village almost encircled by the river great Ouse and the drainage waterways
that feed into it.
Working with speculative narrative strategies, exploring
possibilities for establishing ‘dialogues’ with non-human entities, raises
questions about anthropomorphic projection; what forms of communication are
possible across species boundaries, and to what extent does this method risk
reinforcing anthropocentric perspectives? Is it possible to view and represent
the more-than-human other
through a lens that can disrupt the differential hierarchies of power that underpin our
established relations? The hope is to decentre the human subject, to disrupt
the “rhetoric of domination” (Hayward, 2011, 258) that so often shapes representations of our
relation with animal and other entities. Drawing on feminist materialist
theories[1] that
problematise the notion of a clear divide between the human subject and the
environments we inhabit, between individual psyche and world, I am attempting
to establish a voice that slips between human, animal, mineral subject
positions. This textual experiment and the material processes it describes
explore the ways in which subjectivity is produced in complex relation to
matrices of materiality, sociality and agency, establishing dialogues with
actors and agencies that exceed the boundaries of the individual psyche. I’m in
dialogue not with the opaque other, but with something produced
between my subjectivity and the aspects of the other that I am able to make
contact with. If we are two agents, there is a third agency that is being
invoked, woven between us. It would be wrong to either say that these figures
are knowable, or that they are unknown.
////
Cast
List
Hemlock
Grey
Heron
Aethelryth
Sylvite
Salt
Snipe
River
Great Ouse
Eels
Egret
Ely
Chalk
Limestone
Silica
Silicone
Winnefred
Beaver
™ Standard Modular (Cutter Suction Dredger)
//////
There
are forms of organic structure; delicately rippled hemlock stems, dried and
crimpled leaves, a thistle in the corner with its almost invisible needles
waiting to catch my arms and legs as I brush past it. Rolled ceramic sections
with the imprint of a throat, a belly button, the space between two breasts. A
brushed aluminium frame, glimmering, sits over a silicone impression of the
seat of a dredger, a branch with lichen blossoming over it. Beside it, silicone
punctured with broken salt and sylvite; a fleshy door, a torso flat on the floor, saturated
with ash and a powdering of lichen. A bird-like face dimples at the instruction
of a hand reaching out towards it or settling flatly at its throat. Brambles
protrude from beneath this skin and the thorns catch on an almost fluorescent
band at the base of its peaty glove. The ash and peat coming together speak of
the ways personal and geological histories run alongside each other at
different scales and tempos; dragging at each other, pulling at each other’s
edges. Ash formed of the polyester of Dad’s remaining possessions; a BHS suit,
white cricket gear from the eighties embroidered in navy thread with an arching
Umbro shield, two pairs of stained plimsolls
fabricated in Vietnam. These things I gathered together behind Mum’s house on
the old golf course. The area was cordoned off for the new housing estate but
in the meantime still a wilderness of bramble, grasses, hawthorn, ash saplings,
field mice and even barn owls. Six piles of clothes and other objects placed
amidst the feral landscape (now it is tidy, a stony path runs through it
towards a huge perfectly flat playing field turfed with florescent grass that
is sprayed regularly, the estate of surreal geometric houses rising over it
like the animated render of a computer game). I set each pile of possessions
alight, Mum and Al watching, chilly, as dusk falls too soon. The peat is lumpy,
an arm revealing its insides with glistening silicate shimmer.
////
On
the floor a body is marbled with ash, chalk and alabaster, pale violet quartz,
lumps of salt and sylvite sticking up out of the skin. The layered mixings
suggest the silted markings of an estuary, and at once a sedimentary
accumulation; chalk and limestone for the bedrock at the edges of the fen; the
areas where the land breaks with the water, the Isle of Ely and the raised fen
edge communities that hover over the swamps and meres and meadows, sitting on
dark mud and peat and clay beneath; a landscape of remarkable preservatory
power, holding the secrets/ remnants of Bronze Age and Neolithic lives. At Flag Fen a whole Bronze Age community tumbled into the water-
intricately woven linen garments, pottery inscribed with slanting incisions and
stone tools, held within a network of wooden boardwalks and shelters designed to hold domestic life out of the
water. Even a bowl of preserved porridge was found; oats held in their sodden
container for two millennia. This was a ritual landscape; small packages of
precious items deposited carefully beside the boardwalks; jewellery, weapons,
tools. The water, with its mirrored surface, became the opening to another
realm. Many of these offerings seem to have been deliberately broken before
being dropped through its surface- swords folded on themselves, gold rings bent
out of shape. Small packages as sacrifices that call on powers accessed through
the mysteries of watery earth.
In
the quarry at Must Farm, several miles South, a major archaeological dig paused
work in the quarry for extended periods after intricately preserved remains of
another Bronze Age settlement were discovered amidst the clay hauled out by the
excavators and bulldozers; perfectly preserved oak and ash tumbled together in
monochromes of bones and mud, being conveyed out on belts towards the
processing plant. These settlements were centred around circular log houses
raised on stilts over the marsh. In the images that document the dig, they
appear out of the clay as spines adorning a wheel, blackened ancient wood
sodden and suspended for two thousand
years. Boats were found hollowed out of enormous
oaks; I visited them near the site in a warehouse lit with scorching light,
peering through windows almost opaque with condensation, the atmosphere damp to
prevent the wood from drying out while scientists treated it with waxes to fix
it against decay. Injected with amino-silicons and paraffin, these boats are
prepared for a purgatorial life in museum displays and storehouses, held in
these spaces as a conjuring trick; to evoke the
texture of a past that is always impossibly beyond our grasp, to illumine
through material presence the lives of others who lived, as layers of sediment,
over this same ground. Others who also lived with the incursions of the water,
who must have existed in a daily negotiation
with the threat of flood, with seeping, muddy ground that turned to summer
pasture, spotted with flag iris, daisies, hemlock, willow.
The
flood is moving through time towards and away from us; the ground below us
holds its many traces and its roar tremors in the air like a warning siren.
These bodies are boats, (or boats bodies), arks, covenants of remembered time.
The
cast figures appear as witnesses to sedimentary unfolding, yet they are wholly
artificial. Technologically mediated beings cast into the future and prizing
open the relation between memory and imagination, the deep past and a vision of
what is to come.
///////
On
the wall a form hangs from tacks, it is salmon toned and extremely delicate;
like the membrane peeled from an onion between the outer fibrous skin and its
opalescent interior. This membranous form, cast from my legs, is covered in
pink-brown petals and seeds that curl off the surface like small thorns - a
punctured fuzzy skin. “Transcorporeality”,
writes Stacy Alaimo, foregrounds “movement across bodies”, and “the extent to
which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the
environment” (Alaimo 2010, 2). Transcorporeality
“denies the myth that human bodies are discrete in time and space… outside the
natural milieu that sustains them” (Neimanis and Walker, 2014, 563). To think through our enmeshment within the environments we
inhabit is to find that we are disturbingly caught in networks of material
exchange that unravel distinctions between the human and non-human, subject and
object, the organic and artificial.
In
‘Tradition’ (Spahr, 2015, 53), a poem of breastfeeding the in the age
of chlorinated naphthalenes, Juliana Spahr writes of feeding her infant son, listing
substances passed between a parent and their child.
“this way all day and all night
long, I hold out my hand and take engine
oil additive into me and then I pass
on this engine oil additive to
this other thing that once was me,
this not really me.
… All day long, like a lion I lie
where I will with not really me and I bestow upon not really me
refractive index testing oils and wood
preservatives.
I lie with not really me all day long,
and so I bequeath not really me a
honeyed wine of flame retardants and fire preventing agents.
I make a milk like nectar,
a honeyed nectar of capacitor dielectrics, dyes, and electrical
insulation and I pass it on every two hours to not really me…”
This
kind of embodied, material engagement with industrial, chemical, pharmaceutical
products shifts an understanding of subjective and physical identity; if we are
wrapped only in the thinnest and most porous membranes, constantly inhaling and
consuming materials that carry with them the produce and waste of
industrialised society, we are absorbed by the agencies of the complex
fluctuating environments we inhabit. We are swimming in fields of substance;
our every breath, every touch, both sustains and makes us vulnerable. Spahr’s
vision of this intimate act of bodily exchange is visceral and haunting; the
body of the parent, contaminated, contaminating.
The
skin on the wall holds the pollen, anthers and petals - thus the reproductive
code - of horse chestnut trees, a species threatened by both a virus and a
biological pest that renders many trees extremely vulnerable and unable to
function within normal seasonal rhythms, their leaves darkening and curling
with autumnal browns in mid-summer, falling well before autumn. The memory of
the virus is undoubtedly caught within this object, itself darkened with decay
as the plant matter ages. If we are to think as and through the resonances and
agencies of the entities that compose the substance of our bodies and the
environments we inhabit, what kinds of rhythms and material engagements, what
sensations and formal encounters might we find necessary?
////
We are
distributed here, laced with ash and opalescent shell surface, the swirl of
paraffin and ultramarine, a rising out of flesh, and scattering of the dead
into the bodies of the living.
Empty
seed pods point us towards the hollow of the mine, its tailings leaking lead,
cadmium and other heavy metals into groundwater; a compelling wound flecked
with tiny particles of the gold its rocks once held. To separate gold from earth, to seek gold in sand; a rhythmic grind of movement and
exchange, encroaching seepage and the resonance of desire and disgust and
disturbing uncertainty.
In
thinking through embodied material engagements, the agencies with which we
exist in intricate, intertwined relation, the body becomes a carrier for
unsettling guests / no entity is distinct / we sense more clearly what it means
for other creatures to contend with the environments they inhabit. We are
“weather bodies”, our bodies “archives of climate”[2](Neimanis and Walker, 2014, pg 562).
////
Embedded
with hawthorn, borage, ivy berries - fading as I write - she is suspended,
losing pigment to the sunlight, gradually moving closer to ghostly form.
Patterns run over her skin; geometric attempts to mark, like lace, her relation
to plant matter and seasonal rhythm. The flourishing implied by the delicate
and subtle hues also carries the trace or memory of disease. These are more-than-human
transgressions, a cast laced with materials both poisonous and medicinal,
disturbingly nonhuman. If she is an angel, or a ghost, she is also a figure
that creeps in under my skin and distributes the scent and texture of botanical
matter, a polite undoing, an itchy corporeal guest. If she were to speak, her
voice would be material, sensual, voice of broken blues, blackened seed,
pointed multiplicity. It would carry a scent of partial decay, the texture of
artificial flesh, silicate replica / memory of skin and cellular structure. A
mixing of mineral and botanical matter, liquid turned stretchy, fluid solid. My
ancient and new-found kin threatening to fade to a pallet of greying browns and
translucence.
Her
presence illuminates a relation between botanical matter, sexuality, desire and
decay. The body as a garden, an intimate plan or map; field riven with
interconnected zones of sensation, significance, erotic and subjective
experience[3].
At my
feet another body, still encased in its plaster mould, is run through with
ground stones, sand, mineral pigments, limestone, chalk, quartz, metals and
mud. Her voice is louder, it speaks the sound of the estuary; the Wash; the
confluence of bodies of water, points of flood and retreat over which silt
accretes. We
see these as if from above, through Google’s drones and satellites, glimpses
from aerial lenses that reveal the land’s secret makeup, its horizontal
organising principles and patterns. She is a peat filled bronze sister, silicone elastomer.
Care must be taken to avoid
contamination from other silicone RTVs that are cured with metallic salts,
chlorinated rubber compounds, PVC plasticizers, amines, sulfur-containing materials and butyl elastomers.
//////
In
the era of the Anthropocene we are the bearers of a multitude of
substances produced within chemical and industrial manufacturing processes; a
discomforting cellular knowledge and familiarity. You tell me the slips of
matter within the skin could get more artificial, the shifts between the
corporeal and geological, between macro and micro scales of register and
recognition more fluid. There is a desire to organise notions of
responsibility, care, intimacy, in ways that are compelling, disturbing and
urgent; to structure meaning in relation to the body, to establish new kinds of
ecological imaginary.
It is
a love story.
To
you, Winnifred.
The cast is a mark of distance[4]. I know of the run and
slip of silicate inner top lip, rub it over throat and neck and collarbones,
inner thighs and the arch of the foot. Your inner ear I fill with ground chalk,
a purplish tinge evidence of mineral trace and Jurassic quartz. I know of the
body's inverse surfaces, those ghost folds where an armpit meets skin on the
side of the chest, fold of the nose, crease of inner elbow. Where you would
have been intricate mesh of tissue, organ, capillaries, my hands, transposed,
lay out these new surfaces of skin - pouring and letting them bleed through
each other. A mass caught with peat and clay, decomposed nettle, elder ash oak
and willow, melding with limestone chalk silt and quartz that swirl together in
the centre of your chest. Through her a slippery and fumbling embrace; I reach
towards you, from the inside.
This
matter resonates with the cacophony of mineral and metallic encounters, the
explosions of the quarry. It is here I find the material with which I fill out
your new body.
///////
On
the floor, rumpled and losing chunks of sylvite, smooth surfaces with the shine
of painted and polished fibreglass. It is difficult to reach towards something
from a distance, but we are always projecting ourselves imaginatively into
other spaces, our experiences of one place layered with others. In “The Poetics of Space”, Gaston
Bachelard explores Carl Jung’s theory of the
childhood home as a “container”
(Bachelard, 2014, 9) for memory, an imaginative
location, submerged in consciousness, that structures the psyche and thought. What role do the landscapes in which we live play in
shaping our imaginative and psychic structures? The atmosphere of a place, its
organic and architectural features, qualities of light, the nature of
its plant life, geological forms, its colours; all
these make imprints on the imagination. There are certain places held within my
memory that surface regularly just beneath consciousness. A carpark outside a
gymnasium where I took gymnastics classes as a teenager; in the memory image
this place is always partially overcast, tall evergreen trees hanging over the
scene. A golf course that I only visited once or twice, but drove past
regularly over a period of years. This place also seemed to be held by tall
dark trees, almost artificial in their presence on the constructed leisure
space of the golf course. These places are somehow aesthetically uncanny,
unsettling, lurking on the edge of cities, consuming large areas of land.
Another place I regularly visit imaginatively; the back playing field of my
primary school in rural Aotearoa. A flat grassy expanse, later installed with a
number of large concrete sewage pipes piled
beneath mounds of earth; a strange kind of
playground. The side of the hall, always in shade, where we once tried to camp
out overnight but became too frightened by unexpected noises and had to wake a
disapproving teacher who let us into the hall to sleep on matts on the floor.
As if they are conjoined imaginatively by a specific tone of feeling or mood, they
seem to be conjured more by an atmosphere than by visual association. It is
complex to untangle whether the mood conjures the sense of a place, or whether
a sense of place conjures atmosphere or mood. We could say however that as we
move through the world our perception of places is structured by associative
accretions of experience, feeling, memory and imagination.
I
woke to find you trembling at the centre of my vision; your delicate green
velvet tendrils luminous and pulsating; like fire. Cremation object, the words
form and hover over you, telling me of your role and significance. You are
there with the doming cage that I imagine as the structure for a Neolithic
kiln, or the simulated virtual black hole sculpture Indy described to me last
night.
/////
We are in the quarry.
A woman kneels, whispering into a membrane, like river weed,
stretched over a pipe
Her face and body died blue with woad and salt crystals
As she whispers her voice resonates, its tone amplified by the
surrounding machinery:
I go
to find you; I have left it late and it is dusky. I pass groups of people
leaving on my way in, cycling through the fields of packed mud and stones, sour
soft smell of metallic earth, violet with an
edge of bitterness. The only people left are groups of
young men in hoodies who pass me as I peer into the bracken drained of colour
by the fading light. I know you by your bright, greenish moss and remember you
here, but can’t now find you. As I pass nervously backwards and forwards along
the path one of the young men appears suddenly from behind a tree. At
that moment I see you and step in under the bramble shade to haul you out. The
man stops, and I realise he has a large black dog on a lead trailing behind
him. I shrink against your mossy root. His face emerges out of a hood and it is
prematurely aged, ceasing marvellously as he squints at me. ‘How did you know
where to find that?’, he asks. I don’t tell him about the dream, but attempt
instead to explain that you will become part of an artwork. ‘Elder’, he croaks, ‘associated in English folklore with magic, though I’ve
never been certain why’. And at that moment his dog breaks out in raucous
barking and he stoops to calm it. I sense you shifting within my grip. Picking
up your full weight I run off towards the river, a finely spread silver sheet
that mirrors the willows and reeds and the peach of the sunset sky.
///////
Two
figures coating themselves in mud on the banks of a Lode
Two
figures lying together in a boat, one on top of each other; sewn together,
thread joining armpits and palms of hands
Two
figures sewn to something
floating below the surface of the water; some kind of feathered being; pulling
at them as it shifts with the current
Bodies covered in the fat of an egret, mixed with limestone and
other minerals from the fen edge
Bodies stained with woad and salt crystals
////
Close
observation/ movement: watching the egret and cormorant over time. Trying to
repeat their movements, developing a language of movement and gesture in
response.
The mixings
A mixing of bloods: my blood and the blood of an eel. This mixture
could then be rubbed around my neck, in order to bring about some kind of
dialogue.
A mixing of fats: my fat and the fat of a snipe; smearing
these mixtures over the body.
Consuming the ashes of an egret: I would cremate it after it died,
and consume the ashes over a period of time in order to invoke its voice within
me.
[1]I draw on the work of Elizabth Grosz, Stacy Alaimo, Donna
Harraway and Kim Talbear, among others, all of whom in different ways mount
strong critiques of a Cartesian notion that the self is contained, that we
exist as singular, contained entities.
[2] Neimanis and Walker propose the temporal frame of ‘thick time’ (Neimanis and Walker, 2014, 559); a conceptual proposition
that we reimagine our relation both with temporal ontologies and the ways we
situate ourselves spatially and imaginatively in relation to climatic phenomena
and the environment. Drawing on Nancy Tuana’s conceptualisation of ‘viscous
porosity’ (Tuana, 2008 quoted in Neimanis and Walker, 2014, 564), they draw
attention to tensions between the fluid slips of physical and material identity
suggested by transcorporeal ontology, its disturbance of the ‘fallacy of an
impermeable skin’ (Neimanis and Walker, 2014, 564), and a notion of the world
as replete with points of resistance and opposition, necessary to temper
romantic conceptualisations of states of undifferentiated fluidity. I imagine
this section could be extended with an exploration of the role of boundaries and
membranes in thinking through relations between imbrication and difference raised
by explorations of transcorporeality.
[3]I would like to add in relation to this section reflections on Fina Miralles “I
Am All the Selves that I Have Been”, and Carolee Schneemans “Fuses”; both of
which explore in different ways the body as a site of “‘interior knowledge”
(Schneeman quoted in Applin et al., 2022)
[4]I refer here to reflections on the casting process in a text written by Cadence
Kinsey and Tom Morgan to accompany my exhibition ‘Andesite’ at Bosse and Baum Gallery
London, December 2020.
//////
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