Essay

This piece of writing supported my MA Fine Art final project ‘ And They’ll Come Home’ (2020)

Introduction

 “This show is a poem written with objects” (2006, p.6), declared Grayson Perry in relation to his 2006 exhibition, The Charms of Lincolnshire; my own works looked to echo this sentiment. Archival photographs are displayed, unlabelled, alongside art objects, in a white space, inviting one to sense the materiality and examine the detail (fig.1). My inquiry investigated how a sense of place materialises through creative practice and took place within the boundaries of my house, a Victorian vicarage and the hinterland.

Throughout this project I have taken an autoethnographic approach. Walking, gathering, and recording provided a methodology for thinking about place whilst temporal acts of touching, sorting, sensing and placing embedded a sense of presence and a poetic understanding of my materials.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s advocacy for a way of thinking “that assigns primacy to processes of formation as against their final product” (2010, p.2) has been useful to consider in this context. He casts the assertion to “follow the materials”, and to reimagine the world as an ‘environment without objects,’ contending this is “not a material world but a world of materials, of matter in flux” (Ingold, 2010, p.8).

The distinction between things, as ‘matter in flux’ and objects, as culturally understood forms, has been an important consideration. I’ve looked for resolutions that enable the emergent potential of materials to be evident whilst hinting at a lost or forgotten social context that communicates “a certain gathering together of the threads of life” (Ingold 2010, p.4). Ingold’s argument for a world of things draws on philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that “to observe a thing is not to be locked out but to be invited in to the gathering. We participate . . .  in the thing thinging in the worlding world” (Ingold, 2010, p.4).

The title for this exhibition, And They’ll Come Home, is suggestive of returning back to a place, historically but also geographically and refers to rural tradition, folk rhyme, and lost meanings.

Theoretical, critical and artistic frameworks

Using an anthropological lens towards objects and materiality I engaged with discourses in both material culture and phenomenology. I define objects by what people do with them, they are holders of memory and identity through association and usage (Stewart, 1993; Turkle, 2011); while through a phenomenological approach, I contend, objects or things are embodied and have agency. For me, the felt experience of place is woven into the aesthetic embodied object, (Ingold, 2010; Best, 2014; Dewey, 1980; Legg, 2012; Johnson, 2018); both Hodder and Ingold have usefully referenced Heidegger in seeing all material as an entanglement of things. (Ingold, 2010; Ingold, 2013; Hodder, 2012).

Privileging touch and the tacit dimension in making and sensing objects, I have drawn inspiration from Yi-Fu Tuan’s descriptions of tactile aesthetics in nature (1993) and Pallassma’s work on ‘sensory and embodied [modes] of thinking’ (2009, p.7).

Emplacement theory (E.S. Casey, S. Feld, D. Howe) has been central to my understanding of the phenomenology of place, which looks to the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment” (Howe, 2005, p.7). Social anthropologist, S. Pink’s advocacy for emplaced autoethnographic research (2009) brings together theories of perception, place, knowing, memory and imagination enabling me to recognise I am “part of a social, sensory and material environment” (Pink, 2009, p.2).

Focused on material presence and bodily affect I have looked to the artist Eva Hesse (Best, 2011), for her strength in balancing contradictory material qualities and metaphorical associations (fig. 2). Grayson Perry, whose ceramic works draws inspiration from museological collections, and a fascination for “social archaeology” (Perry, 2006, p.6) has helped me understand my position as a craft practitioner in a fine art context (fig. 3).  Other inspirational artists straddling the divide between craft and fine art include, Caroline Achaitre’s, dissonate, primitivist forms (fig. 4) and the intimate sculptures of Christiana Lohr (fig. 5).

 An engagement with place

Central to my research is “the idea that ethnographic experiences are ‘embodied’ – in that the researcher learns and knows through her . . . whole body” (Pink, 2009).

Embodied ethnographies argue against the distinction between sensation and intellect, which imply the “objectification of the corporeal experience by the rationalising mind” (Pink, 2009, p.3). Pink draws together works by phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty and ecological psychologist J. Gibson to discuss how researchers learn and know through their “whole and experiencing bodies” (Pink, 2009, p.3).

I moved in and around outdoor spaces, picking up sticks, feathers and seeds, noticing small movements and tracing desire lines through the trees, defining routes and marking out stopping points along the way (fig. 6). “There is something about a path through trees that captures our imaginations. Maybe it goes back to folk tales of children walking through forests” (Farley & Roberts, 2012, p.32), how true this is. Not only were my senses engaged, my mind imagined stories and brought forward memories of childhood as I walked. 

My relationship to this place was both social and physical, with memories and past experiences mingling with the sensation of being in the landscape. S. Feld in Places Sensed and Sensed Places is useful here in citing H. Bergson in Matter and Memory, “there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience” (Feld, 2005, p.181).

I sensed the history of this place, it’s garden and enclosed spaces through all my senses and within my body. It is a holding place for memory, time, the land and nature, surely this is what philosopher E. C. Casey meant when he stated, “places gather things in their midst – where things connote animate and inanimate entities” (Casey, 1996, p.24). The mantelpiece became the gathering place for these thoughts (fig. 7).

Finding a route to making

Drawing and painting provided an initial way to map the area. In A field guide to getting lost, R. Solnit wrote, “how will you go about finding that thing of which is totally unknown to you?”, my art practice asks the same question. Feeling my way seemed a good place to start. I spent time drawing through touch only (fig. 8 and 9), and only then by sitting amongst the trees (fig. 10).

Drawing seemed inadequate in expressing the materiality of this place. Picking up a needle and thread I began translating drawn lines into stitch (fig. 11), couching nature (rhododendron seeds) directly to paper (fig. 12), yet the threads and seeds felt constrained. The work only started to resonate with my sensory experience once I freed the materials from the paper.

In order to understand how my bodily engagement is communicated through the art object, I’ve looked to Mark Johnson’s writings on embodied aesthetic experience (2018). He uses the philosophical work of J. Dewey to argue that aesthetics encompasses all the processes by which we enact meaning and “is tied directly to sensory, motor-affected processes which have both structure and emotional valences” (Johnson, 2018, p. 210). My experience of walking and being in this place became intensified and meaningful within the structures of binding, cutting and stitching. This draws on Dewey’s belief that “aesthetic quality is emotional”; he “believed the passion of the maker becomes fused with the emotion of the aesthetic object” (Leddy, 2016).

I released the rhododendron seeds from the paper and began binding them together into a fragile rope (fig. 13). Anchoring it to a stick (fig. 14), I could now understand what it wanted to do; this was a reciprocal act, like Ingold’s analogy of the kite, as it took to the air, my rope of seeds wanted to be waved in ceremonial use or as an act of divination,  it was no longer ‘an object … but a thing … as a thing exists in it’s thinging” (Ingold, 2010, p.7).

Making and Curating

Collecting gave purpose and intent to the daily ritual of walking. Feathers, seeds and leaves piled up in the studio. These accumulations could of course remain as a pile of matter, however I wanted to find a resolution that charted a course between Ingold’s ‘things’ as ‘matter in flux’ and objects as ‘place holders’ for memory (Stewart, 1993).

The collection of crow feathers (fig. 15) proved tricky to separate from their cultural resonance. Initially, I looked to create dissonance, stabbing them into beeswax using erratic hand gestures, it took on the appearance of an errie bird scarer or talisman. Experimenting with curatorial practices, I hung it in the outbuilding to gather cobwebs (fig. 16). This object looked broadly familiar yet was charged “with a creeping strangeness” (Trigg, 2012, p.27), bordering on the uncanny that intensified in this setting. I was considering at this stage whether to exhibit all my pieces as an installation in the outbuilding (figures 17 and 18).

 Although I enjoyed this added layer of eeriness, I felt a gallery setting would create the contemplative sense of quiet dislocation that the work required. The objects, already in a state of entropy needed the isolation of a neutral setting; with this in mind, I looked to remake the feather object.

In this remaking, I drew inspiration from L. Mazanti’s notion of the “super-object” (2011) sitting in parallel to designed objects, whilst containing “(super-)layers of meaning that relate to visual art” (2011, p. 62). I required my objects to stand as metaphors for craft, alluding to functionality with an authenticity of the makers hand whilst, articulating “hidden perceptions” (Mazanti, 2011, p. 62). The crafted object by this definition draws on both visual art and design, with it’s own aesthetic logic while at the same time, existing in the social context of material culture studies and design discourse. 

The resulting work took the form of a book, each feather stitched into place with precision (figures 19 and 20). Unlike the rhododendron seeds, the feathers lent themselves to being placed neatly “into a world of attention” (Stewart, 1993, p.151), the book form gave them value and a social context.  Now tamed, their pagan magic was held isolated within the neutrality of the white pages. It felt right to place this object on the floor, like an offering (fig. 21), the black feathers in correspondence with the white angels at the church alter (fig. 22).

Conclusion

Imagining this exhibition as “a poem written in objects” (Perry, 2006, p.6), I composed 5 verses with 16 objects. Each verse articulated my emotional response to the vicarage, it’s garden and grassy verges.

I endeavoured to follow the materials as they formed into objects, reflecting on each iteration, noticing how they resonated and corresponded with each other. Yet, so much of the creative process took place in my sub-conscious, with visual echoes revealing themselves only after the final curation.

This vicarage had been the centre of community activities, it’s rituals and rites of passage. The layering of memory, social history together with handling raw materials added to my sense of entanglement and flux. This place, I believe, animated my ideas and feelings and in turn, these ideas and feelings, animated this place (Basso, 1996).

List of References

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