Zoans: Studies in Porcelain for H

 

 

These are some instruments such that H might play with. For those that have been reading my posts, it should be possible to work out who or what H is. Pythagoras divided, Ovid reassembled although Theophrastus is the first author of this unification. 

I am looking to render such things in different ways.

 

Low Residency: Day 4 – Sound Workshop

 

 

It has been some time since the Low Residency. Many thanks to Ed Kelly for condensing into a relatively short time frame a great deal of theory and making. I was already very familiar with Audacity but there is always something to learn and I have taken on board a number of ideas. The great usefulness was to clarify and formalise certain practices that I have followed either intuitively or uncritically. The principle one is the idea of cutting or editing at zero. This avoids clicks and pops producing clean edits. The other is more a concept, that of fragmentation or deconstructing sound into atomic elements which can then be used as building blocks. This ties in with the introduction to Musique Concrete in a Skype lecture a few weeks ago.

We spent time harvesting sounds from a variety of objects. I was particularly taken by a small music box mechanism that Ed brought along. He turned the handle in short bursts while I recorded. This broke up what would have been a familiar melody into fragments of sound. It is a fascinating approach to capturing sound, so much so, that I ordered a number of mechanisms over the web with which I have started to experiment. 

Ed mentioned Pure Data, a visual programming software which was, however, too much of a learning curve for the workshop. Although I have started using it, it is too early to say if I shall be using it in the final works, much depends on whether I can find work-arounds to my aims rather than spending too much making-time learning how to use it. 

After collecting the sounds, each one of us put together a short soundwork (below). I was particularly taken by the reverberation in the stairwells  (pictured above) running up the new building at Camberwell. 

 

 

The rectangular spiral staircase resonated in my mind with the spiral stairs at the Queen’s House we visited in Greenwich.

 

 

Pure Data

The previous post talked about sound and sculpture in terms of building blocks of non-verbal language. This is a fascinating area of theoretical practice that seems somewhat neglected whether because it is seen as irrelevant or the two areas are separated by a formal academic-professional gap I do not know. Artists have used sound and sculpture together, but as I have said before, one as the container or instrument of the other, not as equals. I do not presume to find a perfect balance between the two but I do approach them as having, at least theoretically, homological correspondences. Using basic units as the building blocks of each respective language, much as phonemes are the basic units of speech, I can perhaps meld the two together. Curiosity as to whether this succeeds is part of the impetus for the exploration.

I still maintain that sculpture is silent and sound disembodied. Sculpture primarily finds its place in my kinetic being, sound vibrates the corpus as an intangible organ sounding within me. Regardless of how they are interpreted they at least have this in common, that they inhabit the body as the closely related physical senses of touch and vibration. 

I have been looking at Pure Data as a means of generating sound, the basic components of it, vibration as frequency, pulse and volume. At last I have worked it out by following some videos on YouTube. The actual mechanics are simple, the syntax is straightforward enough. The learning curve seems to reside in understanding what each object does and how it interacts with other components. From this sounds can be generated without reference to outside associations. This seems the way, at least in great part, for crossing the boundaries between sculpture and sound in the purest sense; how sound can be shaped and moulded to correspond with sculpture… and vice versa, or perhaps even shaped synchronously. Sounds generated can then be edited in some other software or generated in situ and manipulated in real time.

 

Impromptu 2.0: Video for

 

 

For the mini popup show at Camberwell on Wednesday 20 March 2019: a 30 second video following from the idea of ‘Do Shadows Dance When There Is No Light?‘, or as I would call it now, ‘Do Shadows Dance in the Dark?’ Having received an email from Jonathan notifying of this imminent show, each one being given 30 seconds of time, I set out that very evening to complete this short. To make something that only lasts half a minute within a short short time frame was a very good constraint on my normal practice, something akin to a workshop timetable.

 

A Decision Made

 

 

Unconcerned curves hide the sharp pricks that bleed me in your making. Without remorse. Deep from within the surface of your smile again you bear your self determination, one of Gorgon’s tresses fallen with pride glinting as juice that trickles from rotting fruit; dry as husks in autumn scattered in a storm… yet you are the start of something not quite new but close enough. The indecision of the surface skin broken into pieces and made clear in the late Winter sunlight. I see now that things must be all things and I must double my response as you reflect your shadows in a dancing pair. Light does not come from one source alone; I cannot be one but many. My thoughts are not wedded to a single species but a whole kingdom, writhing, wrestling with life and loyalty rests only with the sense that there is nothing that cannot be. 


I have thought hard about which way to go in terms of the aesthetics of the project: surfaces, forms, degree of working, colour, details and so on. I mentioned in an earlier post about the tension between unity of style and variety of content. My nature is such that there is no answer but to encompass all ways and let the underlying algorithms of my mind make the connections and trust that these rise to the surface of what people see: the Mid Point Review has been a great affirmer of what I thought.

I now have a clear way forward; to allow crazy variety, if that is what happens, to manifest itself. The works themselves must be all they can be and not constrained by some overall sense of stylistic cohesion: the world manifests itself in wonderous variety. So now I must work and test, experiment, and reach and grasp outcomes that inform what is to come and trust the process I have gone through. There is much to do in the given time so from now on I shall gather what I have made in my mind and build with it the steps to another world grounded in this one. The above is an image of a porcelain piece in progress accompanied by a written impression of how the process of deciding within one piece affects me. 

NB: The surface skin refers to the outer aesthetics of the finish.

 

Low Residency – Day 1: Collaborative Project

 

 

An introductory collaboration where we formed small working groups to work on a one day project. The starting theme emerged out of a poetic exposition of the art of seeing by Jonathan where an ideal society was likened to the growth of a tree: what if  society were to grow like a tree.

A tree displays its leaves so that each one can receive as much light as possible and the living mass above ground is balanced with an equal amount of biomass unseen, below ground. The leaf metaphor proposes an vision for human society where every individual is naturally furnished with equal nourishment and opportunities. I felt that the underlying theme aimed at seeing the groups as analogues for a wider society and the project each one embarked on was its development, growth and flourishing. 

We were given materials, artificial detritus, paper, plastic, leaves and threads amongst other things which could be inserted and composed in thirty-five millimeter slide frames and finally slide projectors.

 

 

We sat down and devised an initial plan to give us a framework to enable us to work together productively, creatively and enjoyably. At first we worked as individuals exchanging ideas but each one following their own initiatives, each slide being viewed with the projector and placed to one side. The variety of images was interesting and the whole process gave me ideas about how to create abstract images as a divertisment from my normal practice.

 

 

Having collected a large number of slides, a group self organised to create a slide show of the images on Apple imovie. They were captured by photographing the projections, scanning and photographing the slide in natural light with the outside environment as a backdrop. The confluence of approaches was collated on the computer selecting and composing a sequence that would be used for a final presentation.

 

 

While this was being done, I and Kelda created a shadow puppet show improvising characters and scenes with the materials available. The show was captured as a video by phone. The arrangement was awkward to film and the result had a perspective slant which had to be incorporated in the overall movie. A soundtrack was also created from the video sound and we also improvised sounds in a cupboard room to overlay on the movie video. 

 

 

The exercise was not so much about the finished project, not even the making process but rather the process of working together and how very different personalities could come together to form something that holds more than its content. Seldom if ever do I have to cooperate as an artist with someone else and this was a refreshing experience that allowed me to slough off the burden of personal responsibility. Under time pressure, often a stimulus to productive innovation, I was able do things that I can work on in the future. Perhaps not for the MA, but shadow puppets would make a wonderful hobby allied to my main. 

Obviously the final movie was incomplete, disjointed and at points incoherent but that does not matter. The overall did have a sense of narrative and humour evidenced by the laughter it elicited during its screening. The four groups produced very different final results perhaps showing that societies cannot all be the same and neither could they. 

 

 

Traces, Thoughts and Transformations

 

 

The wet clay leaves a trace, a marker of its passing. All things leave a ripple in the fabric of the universe, gradually sublated into the chaos of complex interactions, inexorably moving towards randomness. But the random is not without pattern; a lack of pattern is a tell-tale sign of order. The patterns we perceive in random systems are unpredictable, truly formless. Those patterns are the conceit of the mind, progeny of the brain, evolved to recognise symmetry… or invent it. 

But these traces are not random, they are chaotic, and that is something very different. Photographing and manipulating the image gives rise to a pleasing pattern, something of aesthetic significance but without knowing its provenance, of what value is it? Does value lie in the way it is selected and treated, in perception, context and inferrences? How deliberate must a work be? Is intention the framework around which a work must be built or is there something else at play?

To look at the stain on the floor, the shape of clouds, a flower or bird in flight all delight the mind but is this enough? Maybe, but I feel that transformation of source material is key for something to become art: a metamorphosis into ordered form, the aesthetic; change engendered in the mind, the conceptual. Hand in hand they must walk together as sensation and idea.

Is digital transformation enough for the artist?

 

Logos/Oracle – only when I do do I know

 

 

The component parts are completed before firing and assembled as evidence of work; each labelled in the mind for an ostensible function that has yet to be thought of. The real underlying reason for its making though, is separate from its illusory presence and is still a secret unfolding: the maquette becoming its own self and not the reason of another.

The guts, its interior are not yet formed, an embryo setting down the matrix from whence its inner working will emerge and the cry of life which is not yet rung. The pieces lie as repertory for a future as though laid in a museum.

My thoughts on it have turned and given rise to other musings.

 

 

Dissecting Logos

 

 

The word is shaped as I work.

Action and thought flow into one another and take form transcending the word as it approaches its own making. Speaking it dissects its anatomy but only once the task is completed, exposed to close scrutiny. Then, mind and eye, memory and knowing become its making and fill the sentient void. 

The rigid form from fluid matter is hard to coax as a single moment; the process slow and deliberate, tricks and turns. A morsel of the conscious mind passes through and changes, as change must come from passing. Observed, there will be no certainty