Mapping Sloughing

I'm studying MA Contemporary Art & Archaeology part-time and therefore my attention has been taken up with lots of writing in a journal and not so much on the blog. It has been very absorbing and helpful. Leading me to think about the found object collections I make and subsequent assemblage works as a kind of conceptual mapping. Not in any way topographical or geographical representations of space, but how feelings about being in certain spaces and how this related to how I thought the objects I found gathered together.

For this recent open studio I constructed a hanging hoizontal grid and played around with a couple of older collections I'd made quite near the studio. Mapping, now realigned, enabled things in the map to relate to each other as well as to my memory of how I found them. Different species of maple leaves were kept apart, pine needles formed a row like the row of pine trees alongside the trainline from whence they came, plastic headphone casing cradled smashed headlight plastic because I thought of how that might sound that whenever I saw them. But there were visual groupings that related only to each other - circles and colour related maps that were woven into the whole - where I was thinking about those collecting walks, archaeologists call them 'walkover surveys', where the first thing I'd picked up became set a key for all the other things I was drawn to subsequently.

Adding an Arduino powered servo which hit the grid repeatedly made all the things move and shimmer and I amused myself during the day with adding more things and changing the tempo of the servo. It didn't take much might to make everything in the grid move just a little bit - some pushed a little each time until they fell off. 

I seemed to have re-attuned myself over the day. That night I didn't sleep well, constantly visualising little bits of stuff vibrating. Kept catching sight of things possibly moving out of the corner of my eye. Fortunately it only lasted one night!

Since this, I've been thinking more about mapping and specific experience of place. I've been limiting my collections to one walkover and then seeing what I can make. This has co-incided with the seasonal dropping of tree and shrub twigs - they dropped their leaves in January - which is fine material to make grids with. I have dogwood, birch and mistletoe. And I've gone back to using scanners as a way to document and create further grids to accentuate the action of watching and recording.

Stalemate

I saw the remains of this hawthorn which has become impaled upon a galvanised steel fence between industrial road and rail track. The tree with its limbs pinned in the fence, scalped by the rail workers who were eating lunch by their vans down the way having just finished tidying up when I passed by, seemed to me an allegory of the embeddness of human structures in an organic world rather than the other way around. 

As an organic intervention in the metal grid requiring branches to become involved in the fence I was reminded of the failed freedom of Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape; caught up in razor-wire with the motorbike engine still pointlessly throbbing. I’m Generation X and this to me is an iconic image of failure of the individual despite determined action against a larger, organised and well-equipped foe. Yet we know the outcome of that war and therefore know that combined action can create freedom from tyranny. In this instance, the tree still lives and will regrow. There are small shoots of regrowth showing even as it stands chained to litter and decay. Its roots are wedded in concrete through which the railworkers will not cut. So the system that impoverishes it also saves its life. It is embedded in this landscape. It can't escape but neither will it die. It remains in an obstinate stalemate which is what I chose for its name. 

I think this is a poor framework for a future relationship with our environment. I dislike framing that as a battle as much as I am repulsed by actual violence. It is an inherited battle for survival that no side can win without sustaining loss and I think we are better to reorganise our culture around acceptance and making space for all. 

I recently read Nick Hayes' book 'Trespass' in which he recounts his own travels across several constructed barriers and the history of enclosure of land in this country. He reveals the private/public ownership of land as a vastly unfair monopoly of shared resources by the rich and a dichotomy that is visible sculpted into our landscape as field boundaries, hedges, walls and ditches. So I'm showing the (current) final print as part of a fence-like assemblage.

Because it's installed in a window it can only be viewed from two dissimilar points so I chose to put Stalemate on the inside because it is more hemmed in. 

On the side that can only be seen from outside (which you can see here) I put prints made from marks that try to transcribe birdsong above a hard-ground and aquatint print of a group of digger buckets that were being used in the same plot of land where the birds live. I suppose it is a flight of fancy, but if it is possible for me to try and write in human ways the conversation between birds, and I obviously did, then perhaps it is also possible to imagine a conversation between inanimate objects and the living. And it might be easier to do that if we comprehend that we cannot understand either of the languages of the speakers. Hense, the name of my installation is 'Other Conversations'.

I've been working on Stalemate for a while and it's taken several forms so far. Firstly, I painted it on polythene but the result was too light and flighty for such an obstinate tree.

At first drypoint versions of it were constrained by the size of my A4 press which led to a fragmented version. This has its own character and might be something I look at doing again. 

I'm planning to make a hardground and aquatint zinc-plate of it which will allow me to explore the detail and stand up to more experimentation than the plastic CadFoil version I've been using.

Journal notes: Weird Embodiment. [edited]

Today I finished a first reading of Timothy Morton’s Weird Embodiment. I am wondering how waste objects factor in to the vast array of partial things in nowness – the everlasting moment sliding between past and future - in appearance and essence, ambiguous objects in the Mobius strip of reality. It would seem that we are fooling ourselves that objects ever go out of connection with us. 

“…things do exist, yet they exist insofar as they are shot through with nothingness.”  Is this an agnostic turn?

 

“Since there are no top, bottom or middle things, there is no whole of which things are all components. Thus things are

necessarily partial.”
"And if you want to think of amalgamations made of partial parts, these form and reform, in a never ending, therefore never beginning, always turning, mobius strip of time."

 

He has things to say on beauty and Spinach art which make me remember an old crit where I struggled to express myself. There was a hierarchy of beauty that I struggled against too. “Art as disgust maintains a standard of taste, if only in the negative, which is why it is constantly struggling against beauty, against the seduction of the aura, against determinacy and the constraints of form.”

 

I begin to re-see why I am attracted to litter and waste and see in those abject objects some of the attributes of beauty. Because in waste objects disgust and beauty are joined and the difference between them becomes nullified in the struggle, which holds you in the moment of beauty, oggling at surfaces and lets you see past that to the object. Which becomes a moment in itself defined by its relations to others, both a product of processes and series of past relations, and a cypher of moments where this entity is called non-entity / nothing now and yet holds everything in its past association and lurks in the future as a frame of reference but at the edge of the frame.

Conversing with human litter is to be transported to the past via nothing more than an action of discarding,  a leap into a void; a gap when an object moves on from relation with humans as a component part into a new non-human amalgamation, (what we might lazily call nothing). Like old skin, it's there, we just don't want to recognise it as ours.

Which is why litter always strikes us as strange, weird and therefore disgusting – and we impulsively draw away from it. Litter drawn back up and examined, such as art made with found objects or an archaeological dig presents to us a chance to experience a new altercation with nothing, and with the non-human amalgamations that are out of our sphere of experience. It’s like meeting an alien who was once your next door neighbour.

This is a close up image of a scraper stone surface showing the scratches on the worn side. 

I made a watercolour and pencil sketch of a piece of litter from the collection; a crumpled gold foil chocolate wrapper, the gold exterior flattened around the white paper interior that buds from the centre, unfolding like a pair of twisted grey lips; the lips of the chocolate eater split and ready to eat. The foil shimmers in the close bright light I set to cast a deep constant shadow from which to draw. If I move my view will move, and the foil will shoot off light from its many angles and my subject will not be still and my drawing will be more difficult to achieve. I must be still to control the shimmering. Hold myself constant in relation to the chocolate wrapper. 

I started to think of the foil folds as stone surface.

21 February 2021

“embodiment is not a case of being situated constantly and presently, but rather of shimmering or flickering.” T Morton ‘Weird Embodiment’