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Essays

Mini assignment.              11th October, 2022.

Write a short text (roughly 500 words) that discusses specific materials used in an artwork that interests you or relates to your practice and research.

• what is present in the work, what is there, what it is made of; look at the processes used to shape or fashion it; look at the scale and weight and source of the material;

• what are the characteristics of this material? what can it do? how does this work demonstrate this?

• why has the artist used this material?

• upload the writing and an image of the work to the Moodle page and blog.

                                                      

Elizabeth Frink( 1930 - 1993)

Maquette for Torso (1956) 

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The Holburne Museum in Bath was exhibiting work of Elizabeth Frink (1930 - 1993) whose practice spanned sculpture, drawing and printing. She particularly liked to draw and sculpt simple, basic and what must have been to her familiar every-day subjects - men, horses and birds - like crows, owls and kestrels.

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The sculpture which struck me most at the exhibition was her winged man, here called Maquette for Torso (1956), in bronze:

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The interpretation next to the torso reads: “Frink worked in a figurative style, favouring the male form over the more conventional female nude.  She used the male figure to express vulnerability and aggression, as opposed to the traditional view of man as an ideal beauty. “

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I was looking at the maquette trying to see how it could have been seen as aggressive and I couldn’t.

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In the Catalogue Raisonné of her sculpture Frink is quoted as saying:

“I can sense in a man’s body a combination of strength and vulnerability – not as weakness but as the capacity to survive through stoicism or passive resistance …  My earlier figures – were involved with fractured wings or the debris of war ..” (CR P 28)

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Bronzes always strike me as solid, which they aren’t, and so the strength, rather than the aggression, comes through in what it appears to be. The strength is ironic because one of the qualities of the alloy bronze is that it is hard but brittle. There is nothing that I have read which suggests that Frink means to imply this in her nudes.

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The elemental reddy-brown colour of bronze gives the statues the impression that they are part of the earth but the colour is arrived at by a string of processes in their manufacture. Fire, clays, resins and various wax applications at different parts of the process have all played their part in the final piece, its reception and consumption.

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The style achieved through the little slabby surfaces and the squashed legs and wings seem to be of its time possibly influenced by the surrealist sculptor Giacometti (1901 - 1966) - catching the light and reflecting it off the bronze at different angles.  Gone are the smooth perfect surfaces of the impressionist Rodin or Degas bronzes.

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The lifted wings, one spoon-like echoes Giacometti’s spoon-like arms in his subjects, the other, like a fractured wing, give it vulnerability putting the wing at the mercy of the air.

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Of Giacometti, Frink said: “the numbing effect of those skinny figures – in the awful inner pressures of his ravaging illness had an effect on his sense of form – so that everything was suffering from attrition and emaciation.  (CR p 34)

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Frink was working in post-war Britain having lived, with her family, deeply involved in the war, her awareness of the vulnerability of the male became evident in her work.  The inside, the clay sculpture, was robust – her awareness of the inner strength of the male nudes she was sculpting must have affected her sense of form.  

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Was it tradition, its colour, its longevity, its resistance to corrosion, its seeming solidity that Frink worked in bronze?

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What I like about the fact that the artefacts are outdoors is that we can touch them.  In a museum or gallery context, the sculptures are invariably locked in a vitrine never to be sullied by any interaction with fingers that the object, its materials and viewers are craving.

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Tim Ingold maintains that after all the academic discussions on materiality, “it is the objects themselves that capture our attention, no longer the materials of which they are made. … Materials always and inevitably win out over materiality in the long term.”  

 

Artists, however, still need to consider how mind and matter coalesce: the scope, significance, values and strengths of their materials come into play when artists construct their artefacts.

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Post-publication: I went to the Catalogue Raisonné where I could not find the maquette of the torso but I did find this photo which looks remarkably like the torso maquette but it has a different name:Home libellule (dragonfly man) and a different year:

Homme libellule 11 1965

References:

Wilder, Jill(ed): 1984. Elizabeth Frink Sculpture.  Catalogue Raisonné.  England. Harpvale.

Ingold,T.(2007) Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14.  Cambridge University Press.  United Kingdom

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/21/giacometti-tate-modern-master-of-all-things-thin 

 25th October 2022

Research as intervention essay

Consider the work of an artist whose practice explicitly (or implicitly) works in relation to systems or structures.

 

They may create work which undermines, upholds, questions, is built upon or is diametrically opposed to a system, structure, series of either or collapsing together of both.

 

•Describe or outline the systems/structures that their work responds to or operates within.

•Question whether their work is successful in what you or the artist perceive its purpose to be.

•Are there additional artists, critics or theorists whose work you can refer to to endorse or oppose your point of view?

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                                     DOING TIME

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"We who utilise our education and intelligence to make the world a better place to live in are horrified by your stupidity and publicity for a crass self-display.  Artist? Ugh!" (Ingold 2021 p 115). 

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"Someone wrote me a letter from the U.N. that was printed in the Wall Street Journal that said we don’t need your kind of work here, it is destructive, we don’t welcome you here." (https://brooklynrail.org/2003/08/art/tehching-hsieh)

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The socio-economic systems and political structures in which Taiwanese Tehching Hsieh made his art in the USA are highlighted in the quotes above: one by an anonymous correspondent in April 1981, the other published by the editor of an influential international business newspaper.  

 

Ingold: "Life, according to this (first) correspondent ...should be devoted to some productive purpose; it should be world-building.  A lifetime, on this account, is measured by its achievements.  Time that contributes nothing to the sum of human achievement is time wasted." (Ingold 2021 p 115 ) 

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Hsieh made six timed performance pieces between 1981 & 2000,  in which he did without something for a year at a time - restrictions included not leaving a delimited space in an attic; performing specific actions on the hour every hour; being tied to another artist by a length of rope; not going inside anything in New York; have nothing at all to do with art; for his final piece, he disappeared for just over 13 years: "I kept myself alive"(idem).

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Is this a lesson in a waste of time & pointless self-obsession?  Hsieh himself says "I have been working hard at wasting time,"(idem)  Ingold argues that, to Hsieh, yes it is a waste of time because to him that waste is a positive experience: "it signals not loss and destruction but the promise of freedom, and of growth.  Unchained from the tyranny of aims and objectives, from the regimentation of time by the clock and of space by the hard surfacing and walled enclosures of the built environment, the imagination can take flight, escaping through the cracks like air through a ventilator, water through leaky pipes." (Idem p116)

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Hsieh started formulating this 'cracks and leaking' idea in 1973 when he saw excess tar spilling over in the daily road repairs.  He started photographing this wasted tar which had come to have its own life as it swirled and streaked.  

 

Although Hsieh's work is time-life based, the accusation that the performances were a waste of time is not justified, in my opinion, because I accept Hsieh's justification of them being art-time and not lived-time.  He claims:" I don't really blur art and life ... my life has to follow art." (Ingold 2021 p 118). All that is left of the work is an archive of images which he takes around the world on lecture tours.  He claims not to be an artist anymore because he no longer makes art.  

 

We could say that those robust accusations of 1981 reveal how stultifying and deeply embedded in our collective psyche are the effects of the time and motion systems studies of the early 20th century.  That the Wall Street Journal, a business focused newspaper started in 1889, should publish a letter accusing Hsieh of making destructive work is quite ironic given the human destruction in the name of progress that emanated from the business-driven industrial revolution.  This is epitomised so poignantly in Charlie Chaplin's 1936 satirical film "Modern Times" in which man embodies machine - and, today, in our virtual, post human, stacked world, that concept assumes a morphed commodified reality. 

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8th November, 2022

Literature and contemporary art

What does your favourite text do for your understanding that maybe has not emerged in other theory/criticism? 

Literature and contemporary art

 

Who would have thought that a poem from 1308 inspired arguably the greatest sculptor  of the early 20th Century to make some of the best known sculptures?

 

This trilogy of 100 cantos divided into 3 sections, each divided into 33 'poems', is by far the most complex yet inspiring text I have ever studied in any language.

When it covers every conceivable frailty and strength of the human spirit, how can it not have universal appeal?

 

Dante Alighieri had a vision, on good Friday in 1308, of the horrors and ecstasies of the human soul depending on how the person had lived.  He expresses what he saw in three books: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

 

This essay will focus on Hell in which Dante shows us the ghosts not only of the people who had died but also of those still living at the time - hoping that they will change their ways.  It was his intention to warn people to live good lives if they did not want their souls to be tortured for ever in the after-life. 

 

In Purgatory, those souls who want to purge themselves of their sins are brought, on a new day, by an angel who will make them aware of the 7 deadly sins.

 

In Heaven, Dante sees the virgin Mary and eventually the sublime light which is God.

 

Dante finished this work in 1320, the year before he died.

 

The first thing that fascinates me is that Dante has chosen Virgil, the greatest Roman poet ever, who lived in the 1st century BC and so not a Christian, to lead him through this existential Roman Catholic experience.   Significant is the fact that Dante is to write 100 poems to deliver his vision.  Virgil has to leave Dante before they get to Heaven because he cannot know the divinities he would see there.  

 

Earth in Dante's time, was the centre of the universe and that idea continues into Hell which is described as a vast funnel-shaped chasm going from near the earth's crust to its centre - the farthest point from God. The concentric levels hold successive classes of impenitent souls, and Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified is at the lowest point: the pit.

 

The work opens with the statement: 

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

A mid-life crisis? Dante sets the scene using nature - a dark wood - to evoke dark emotional feelings in his reader.  He uses the pronoun 'our' to pull the reader in to identify with himself, thus making it an Everyman experience.

 

Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear!  So bitter is that death is hardly more.  But to give account of the good which I found there I will tell of the other things that I noted there.

In that first paragraph he sets the scene in which he himself is still frightened.  So the reader approaches the text feeling frightened - Dante tells us what to feel and we are sucked in.

 

Rodin's sculpture 'The Thinker' tops his famous Gates of Hell drawn explicitly from the Divine Comedy and depicting Dante himself.  Rodin's Dante is a strong, muscular being representing his standing in literary spheres.  

 

Another world-famous sculpture by Rodin is also on the gates: 

The Kiss:

Tate Modern permanent collection- the offending book is in Paolo's left hand.

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Canto 5: the second circle, verse 110:

And when I heard these afflicted souls I bent my head and held it down so long that at last the Poet said to me: "What are thy thoughts?" When I answered I began: "Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how great desire, brought them to the woeful pass?"  Then I turned to them again to speak and began: Francesca, thy torments make me weep for grief and pity, but tell me, in the time of your sweet sighing how and by what occasion did love grant you to know your uncertain desires?"

 

So we have Virgil guiding Dante's inquiry and expression into why the lovers committed their sin.  You can see how Dante himself was suffering to know how the purity of the love of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini could possibly put them in hell.

 

And Francesca replies: 

"There is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery, and this thy teacher knows;"

 

In generalising the pain she feels, Francesca brings into focus the relationship which draws together Virgil, Dante, Francesca and the reader and she is aware of the one who is leading Dante on his journey of self discovery.  Virgil is a poet whose Aeneid is, like Homer's Odyssey,  a journey of self discovery through the troubles that he creates and endures.  Odyssey means trouble in ancient Greek.

 

Francesca tells Dante that it all went wrong in reading the tales of the love between knight Lancelot  and Guinevere.  
"Many times that reading drew our eyes together and changed the colour in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be parted from me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. … that day we read in it no further."

So it is in reading that discoveries are made. 

 

How Dante, the man, could speak for Francesca the sister in law of her lover, caught by her husband, and make it sound so authentic, is what inspired me. 

 

His reaction, as he recorded it, is also so touching: 

"While the one spirit said this the other wept so that for pity I swooned as if in death and dropped like a dead body."  He becomes totally caught up in his own story.

We are not told who this weeping mute person is but the people of the time will have known.

 

Dante uses every technique: time travel, building an atmosphere of dread, uncertainty, guilt and shame.  By his reaction to what he is narrating, he makes us sympathetic to the plight that befalls so many of the characters we meet.  His multiple voices bring together so many strands: Virgil, a Dante construct / puppet in this context,  makes his presence felt by asking Dante questions about the characters, their situation, their sorrowful state; the characters themselves speak to Dante and so to us giving us different perspectives and making us sympathetic to their cause which again, calls on our humanity to understand their plight rather than judge them.  Dante's is an all-embracing understanding of human frailties, of how they need to have a guiding light to keep on the straight and narrow path to salvation.

 

Each canto takes us deeper into hell causing us to know ourselves better.  Yes, some of his spectacles are horrific, explicitly visual causing us to recoil in our seats, but we look on with compassion.  The conversations present plausible situations which can occur to any of us making us more understanding, more sympathetic, more empathic.  This is what we want to do to make others believe in our art, isn't it?

 

The narrator leads us down a path seen by his own Christian dogma yet is led by a pagan guide.  How justified / balanced is that route?  

 

The lacunae are represented by that inverted cone of the structure of hell constructed by the narrator: that chasm of missed opportunities to do the right(eous) thing that culminates in the death of Christ in Jerusalem who, according to Christian dogma, died to save all sinners.

 

The following questions are pertinent to my project:

 

How does this work make me view the people in my project?

 

How does it make me feel to ask  the people I am interacting with to tell me their stories or make art?  Am I justified in asking them to tell me their stories?

 

Dante's work has what LeGuin says a story should have: he bundles all the souls, predicaments and circumstances into his poems.  He is neither a hero nor an anti-hero who lets himself be guided, taught and inspired by one he sees as greater than himself.  Furthermore, we do the same: we bundle all these moving experiences into our make-up bags and become better people for it, hopefully.

22nd November, 2022

How do the politics of Care inform your own work or your interests?

Can you write using a resource from an alternative discipline –

e.g. STS, philosophy, geography, history, politics to describe how your work engages with Care.

 

Who cares?

 

The noun care used in this essay has interaction and link-forming at its core.  It stems from the Latin verb curaremeaning: arrange/see/attend to; heal/cure; provide for; take care of; worry/care about. (Oxford Latin dictionary)

 

This does not mean that it only links human to human, but also human to everything that humans deal with and not only physical & material states - humans deal with digital, virtual material too.  All these materials  need to be looked after, cared about and we need to express how we value and interact with them.

 

The politics of care brings into play more than the micro world of the individual and how s/he chooses to relate with others: people, nature, technology, materials.  It  turns the spotlight on the macro  systems of State and how the State chooses to care for the individual and her/his linked materialisms and vice versa.  What this brings into the equation are decision-making processes simultaneously affecting and being affected by power relations and ethics involving the State, Humans and  Non-human entities.

 

My work concerns both State - human-to-human care, and State - human to nature care.  The positions of power in both areas shift constantly.

 

My human-human work specifically concerns how we relate to (women) prisoners  both when they are serving their time and when they come out having finished their term. My human-to-nature links concern how we relate to plant life in the sea.  The State is hugely involved and influential in both scenarios.

 

The alternative discipline I am using here concerns design at the intersection of Technology and Biology.  Specifically, a TED talk presented by designer and architect Neri Oxman.

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Oxman compares two domes, one synthetic the other organic. One imposed on the environment and the other created organically, one designed for nature and the other by nature.  One deals with assembly and the other with growth.  

 

Oxman is describing a constructed dome using tools and one made by silk worms.  By altering how the worms create their structure, man can use the silk to make a natural dome for which no silkworms were killed and after which all the eggs deposited by the worms will form new worms which will go on to create more and more domes or whatever structures are needed - natural growth.

 

Oxman says that they are only now able to do this because they have 4 fields or disciplines to work with which did not exist even 5 years ago:

The team is developing materials which are flexible and stiff to make new items of clothing using 3D printers, with no seams - materials that can grow and adapt to the body, materials that can change their properties.  

 

How does all this apply to my project?

 

Prisons:  Just as there are new disciplines to help designers, architects and biologists to create stunning new and eco-friendly, sustainable materials in the design and biology world, there are anthropologists (Ingold), Artists (Edmund Clarke, Erika Flower) philosophers, (Foucault) and sociologists (Becky Petit, Bruce Western) who could design a prison system that is not dependent on political whims which, over the centuries have  made or broken the careers of respective ministers of justice.  

 

They could design a system which concerns itself not only with the individuals going into the justice system but also with those who emerge and need to become integrated in society again.  Trying to change  a system has failed over and over again. Can we change people's mind sets about the penal system and why it exists and for whom?  If it exists to put away people who are a danger to society then 76% of those in prison in the UK would be released because, in 2017 only 24% of UK prisoners were deemed to be 'dangerous to the person'.  

 

In 2017 there were 86,000 prisoners each of whom cost the state £37K per year.  The arithmetic will tell us that over £2.4 billion pounds was being spent on prisoners who should not have been in prison and which could be used in helping people with mental health issues, for example. 

 

Above the entrance to HM Prison Dartmoor is a Latin inscription "Parcere Subjectis" which is taken from Virgil's Aeneid.  Aeneas was telling the Roman guards to look after the vanquished who were prisoners of war.  Dartmoor prison was built in 1806 - 9 by French prisoners of war to create accommodation to house those who were being kept in the unsanitary hulks in Plymouth Sound.  How relevant is that inscription today?  More than ever!  

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That is because it is those on the outside who are reading that slogan who need to look after those who come out of prison.  Instead of creating more barriers to reintegration into society, both the public and the justice system need to create and support organisations which really care about former offenders and how they reintegrate into a system which has marginalised them for varying periods of time.  

 

Seaweeds:  what we can do with them; how we can develop their uses; how we can care for the environment in which they live; how much are we aware of climate change & the changes in the oceans.

 

Environmentalist Tim Flannery presents a very convincing TED talk about the solution that seaweed has for drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere.  He talks about seaweed farming and the hope that the seaweed addresses that climate change challenge that we, individual citizens and the State have not met.  

 

Scott Lindell considers how we can feed a growing world population.  He gives the example of how our current farming practices are depleting our non-renewable resources.  He suggests that marine aquaculture is the solution to the problem.  But I wonder if we are going to simply extend the intense consumption of resources to our oceans.  

 

Lindell and many others maintain that seaweed farming is the industry of now - they report on the many  industries that will depend and flourish on seaweeds from food to pharmaceuticals to  textiles to chemicals to new materials and new approaches to materialism, touching every aspect of our lives.  

 

What Oxman, Lindell and Flannery have in common is that they are prepared to learn from nature and, through that learning, can change their and our mindset about living on our planet.

 

Edmund Clarke uses images of weeds found in the therapeutic prison  HMP Grendon to deliver his message of prison reform.   

 

In their novella Falling into place, Heather and Ivan Morison illustrate Erich Fromm's concept of alienation through mass consumption which has made having more important than being, and which has led to cataclysmic changes in the planet and how people relate to it and to one another. 

 

 One of their main characters tells visitors to his caravan concepts which also underline this essay:

"When many of us work together the extraordinary combination of human effort doubles and triples our powers. … There is no place in the caravan for co-dependence, you must take responsibility for your self.  … It is the responsibility of everyone to judge but not condemn.

 

" … we add a new ethos: anonymity.  We have given up the ambition of wealth, fame and the desire of reaching a mass audience for ourselves.  We let the work reach a mass audience." (Pp 115 - 118)

 

No more power games that exploit the state, humans or non-humans.

 

So, who cares? 

Feedback

Re: Politics of care

by Adriana Banari - Tuesday, 29 November 2022, 11:41 AM

If change comes with One's Self, than you are a very good example of a person who fights to make the world a better place. When I first heard about your idea of seaweed and prison women, I thought "Oh, that's abstract, curious how she's going to put the two together", but you've explained the connection so beautifully and poetically, that it left me speechless. I really hope that as artists, we connect with other peoples' struggles and empathise on a deeper level, so on your question "Who cares?" I say "I do"!

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Re: Politics of care

by Stephen Harding - Friday, 25 November 2022, 3:17 PM

Care in our communities and in your examples, of prisons and seaweed, is such an interesting area of concern. Concern because in both cases they are hidden from everyday view. They are easily ignored by a large part of society. With your work on this you are carfully bringing this to our attention. I consider this to be an important role of the artist. Bringing the potential of an asthetic beauty to squishy, slimey seaweed and hope and creativity into prisons.

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Re: Politics of care

by Naomi Fennell - Wednesday, 23 November 2022, 3:31 PM

You've really covered a lot of ground here! But it is really interesting to see the intersections in your two themes: prison and seaweed. The nature of care is very much central to your projects.

Your comment: "But I wonder if we are going to simply extend the intense consumption of resources to our oceans." Of course we are. If there is a way to make money and take resources faster than they can be replace, humanity will manage to do it very successfully.

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Re: Politics of care

by Laura Hopes - Wednesday, 30 November 2022, 9:46 PM

Anna I really get the sense in reading this of a rich synthesis of the different strands of your practice and how they are slowly drawing together. It feels like Puig della Bellacasa's writing is a really useful fit in terms of framing what you have been working on and arguing for for many years, and the politics of care could not be more relevant.

Essay 5: 11th December 2022
 

Et si ...? / What if…?  is a work of Speculative Fabulation concerning the Anthropocene.

 

Characters:

 

 

Goblin mode, Oxy’s run-to state, is the Oxford Dictionary word of the year, 2022.  It’s defined as ‘a slang term describing "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy" behaviour’ so it fits in well with the Anthropocene as it evolves.

 

Permacrisis is the Collins Dictionary word of the year, 2022, and is ‘a word describing an extended period of instability and insecurity’ In this story it is personified as Oxy’s soul mate. This too fits in with the Anthropocene as it evolves.

 

Oreille de Chat* is a singing Cat’s Ear, a False Dandelion often mistaken for a Dandelion by those who don’t know the difference.  Cats’ Ear represents a quiet side of the debates of resilience, adaptation, and the struggle for environmental justice in the Anthropocene. 

 

Dent de Lion* = Dandelion: an underrated plant which gives nourishment and pleasure in equal measures.  Dandelion represents the victims of climate injustice.

 

Virgil: the wise Labrador who feels as much as he hears, and who is in tune with Nature around him.  He does not pass judgement but takes responsibility for what happens. A sense of responsibility engendered by a love that he has for every living being.

 

Dartmoor National Park is shaped by time, nature, and human nature. 

* this plays with words in French: Cat's ear, Lion's tooth because A dandelion is so called because it comes from the French Dent de lion because the leaves of the Dandelion are shaped like lions' teeth.

 

                                    Et si …?  / What if …?

 

Une aventure inattendue de Dent de Lion et sa voisine Oreille de Chat, au parc national de Dartmoor en Angleterre au mois de juillet en 2022.

 

Goblin mode Oxy, and her soul mate  Permacrisis, bump-start Oreille de Chat and Dent de Lion’s adventure quite unexpectedly.  

 

Oreille de Chat takes centre stage.

 

Straddling the great granite walls of Dartmoor jail, I was observing the living and the dead inside the prison grounds, when I was snapped to the present by Oxy and Permacrisis on the outside of the prison with Virgil, the black Labrador.  

 

They have been around before – as welcome in the area as the smell of muckspreading is in August -  picking innocent plants at will.  Oxy spotted my bright yellow heads open wide, futureproofing the next Cat’s Ear generations - it is July, after all, and the delicious sun is bringing in the bees - in places.  I tucked my root extensions firmly into the crevice between the granite blocks just in case Oxy had designs on them.  Oxy looked at me as closely as she could - I was very high up – then she

Oreille de Chat / Cat's Ear / False Dandelion

turned around and spotted my cute neighbour Dent de Lion!  

On the ground, very close to where I was, Dent de Lion was fluffing up her sexy, beautiful pappus ready for the next breeze to spread her progeny.  In her usual goblin mode, unapologetically self-indulgent and careless, Oxy uprooted Dent de Lion and took her away.  

 

 Quelle horreur!  She can't do that!  I will disentangle my root extensions – brittle but strong – and drop uninvited onto Virgil.   Allons-y!

 

What I hadn’t noticed was that there was a Louise Bourgeois derivative monster in the form of a drone nearby. 

Oxy, Permacrisis and Virgil popped into their harnesses and off we went.  Poor Dent de Lion!  Her exquisite pappus was no more than a plump nail head - all her beautifully arranged geometric cypsela were gone, ravaged by the monster's rotor blades - she was so distraught to have had her offspring sacrificed to an unknown fate, that I could hear her sobbing - each tear falling onto her now dried, exposed roots giving them a sense of a vacuumic future.

 

Feeling such a rapid change of scenery was electrifying - so rapid that the eyes in my heads could not focus - what was I seeing? 

 

I was trying to tell Virgil that his fleas were being over familiar, and could he keep them under control - but his silky ears were flapping so hard that I don't think he heard.  But, he must have done because he scarily turned round quickly & snapped at his tail.  

 

Was that a flea parachuting past?

 

The self-assured hubris of a desensitised, selfish Oxy, made her blind to the distress she was causing.  She carried on. 

 

The first place we came to looked something like this:

Oxy tells Permacrisis that this is the place where they get all the clay to make the porcelain tiles in the sprawling shopping mall she calls home; all her special paper and her special toothpaste, and I couldn't hear what special else.  All this just for her???

 

It's such a vast space: a Cathedral to opulence, with its ghosts, goblins and ghetto chic:

Huge quarry, something about Lee Mill, I think she said.  Lovely colours - water - is it, Virgil?

 

Then we shot off, Dent de Lion & I saw something flash before us!  When we got to our next hover, my heads drooped - I suffer terribly from vertigo when I'm not clinging onto granite!  Deep down into an abyss we went:

Lydford Gorge, I heard Permacrisis say - he's been there so many times - if he wasn't in a perpetual crisis, he'd admit to loving the glorious trees!    Everyone goes there - in the holidays it's really packed like today but not nearly as packed as this next place right on the other side of the moor:

Dent de Lion, have you heard of Hay Tor?  No reply.  She can't hear me through her terror.   There are so many people there even today - look at them on those paths!  They look like ant droppings!   And what about the sheep?  Good thing Virgil is in this harness, or he would be down there scattering the woolly jumpers to the 4 winds.  Talking of winds, Dent de Lion, how's your head?  Still no reply.

 

Oh no!  We've just hit a Chiffchaff with the rotor blades!  Oh! And a Yellowhammer! There are several birds up here: juvenile Wheatear, and many Stonechats.  Blackcap in the quarry with plenty of Swallows flying round including some juveniles.  Good to see so many juveniles - at least they have a future, we hope, unless Oxy decides to serve them up at her many soirées! 

 

Back across we zoom - no planning, just get into the jet drone and zoom!

 

Something about oaks - are we going to fly into some trees?

The farm smells here are quite overpowering!  Good thing we are going so fast that only pixels of scent cling to my leaves and stems.  We're only there a few minutes when Virgil barks giving his fleas a reason to jump!  Maybe he can't stand the smell either!  Back over Hay Tor to the fifth stop: Teigngrace.

What a pretty name - more clay for Oxy's pleasure and self-indulgence.  In 1795, Dent de Lion, potter Josiah Wedgewood ordered many tons of this clay from here for his fine porcelain china factories in Staffordshire.

 

Permacrisis looks over his shoulder at me & says “show off!”   He can hear me?? Possibly because there's a near-deafening silence - not a bird to be seen or heard.

 

Back to the other side of Dartmoor and the sixth place:

Lots of people again, splashing in the river, and acres of SUVs trying to get over the narrowest hump-back bridge - there's another bridge further over - why don't they use that one too?

 

I didn't know if I could take much more of this when I heard the Dippers singing after their feed -

such a strong zit-zit sound.  Let me sing it to you in my best voice: 

New Recording 31.m4a

 

Up to the top again & it's quite different:

Why the patchy ground?  It's a building that looks just like the jail but with a flat roof, then I hear something about a castle, whatever that is.  Oxy feels quite at home here - her great grandfather built this in 1910 and it has the most sumptuous décor and just spreads its predatory limbs over the grounds.  Did he build it by himself, I wonder?  It must have taken him a long time.  And it must have cost so much, this prison-castle!  

 

We stop.  Oxy orders a huge lunch for herself and Permacrisis who has been quite depressed all day.   Only the best and the rarest food will do for them, although Oxy will probably leave most of it on the plate, and the smells of the glorious food are intoxicating.  I cough.  

 

Finally, we are back outside Dartmoor jail where Oxy had left her SUV.  Dent de Lion falls, limp, off her lap & I gladly leave Virgil and his pesky fleas.  Permacrisis slouches across to the car and slumps himself dejectedly into it snagging his Prada jacket on the door catch.  Fret not, there’ll be a new one in your wardrobe in the morning!

 

This is a flea's eye view of the places we hovered over, just to satisfy Oxy’s tentacular flirtation with travel to see whatever she wants to in her car, drone, hot air balloon or jet:

What if Permacrisis and Goblin mode's arms, mind, heart, ears and eyes had been open to what was on the ground?

  

They would have heard, felt and seen the Dippers singing “It’s not coming home, it’s not coming home, not coming home!”  

 

Would they have understood?  Hmmm…

Feedback:

Adriana thinks they would have understood.  I have my doubts.

The others liked the story.

Essay 6

17th January 2023

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Using an archival or algorithmic methodology, share some of the threads of your practice. This can take the form of a presentation, a document, an online forum, a performance, an image...

 

The methodology of Mark Dion gives me hope!  Either he is very lucky in finding what he needs in his barn storage unit(s?) that dwarf him, or he has a prodigious memory and nobody else is involved in his ‘archiving’.  

 

I fall into the former category, but, thankfully, I don’t have a barn!  Going back to my teenage years when my parents despaired at the mess on my desk, I recall challenging them to ask me to find something – anything - in that ‘mess’.  They did (a rubber) and I did!  Shaking heads subsequently evidenced their disbelief and continued despair!  Had they failed as parents?   Nah!  I think that disorder and chaos go hand in hand with anarchy which is the best form of democracy.  So, my political ideas were formed early – thanks to them – in part

 

Push forward six decades and the mess is still there but it’s different.  This time I have shifted most of it into storage units and frames; onto bookshelves, an easel or 2, walls, the floor and other myriad surfaces!  Although books have become my go-to hide-away, since starting this course I have attended so many workshops to acquire new skills at making, that ‘stuff’ proliferates!  I find what I need most of the time and only once have I ordered a book I already had!  I am still surprised by my accidental finds too!

 

This of course excludes my digital archives which replicates that mess!  Fortunately, there’s the fabulous magnifying glass icon which can, often but not always, save time in locating errant files, images, presentations, documents, articles, downloads, films and favourite websites.  I wish I had the hardware equivalent!

 

I have learned to duplicate (most times!) the documents and images that I upload to the internet, and I have stopped Norton 360 deleting all my duplicate files!  For months I could not understand why entire folders were empty – I knew I had what I was looking for!  

 

Just to make sure that I am aware of my main threads, I shall use my blog as a guide which you can go to if you want to uncover other threads in the tapestry that constitutes  the first part of this course.

 

A.  The first thread, short and sparse so far, relates to the prison thread of my studies.  It is sparse because I have not made much progress in it.  I had all but given up on it until I did my presentation to the 5th international Carceral Geography conference convened by Melbourne University.  I was really excited by some of the talks I tuned in to and heard what terrific work some academics â€‹and artists are doing in prisons all over the world.  I shall be approaching local, Torbay and Plymouth, organisations that deal with women with mental health issues to see if they would like to try some cyanotypes involving seaweeds.

I have read Simon Mayo’s novel “Mad blood stirring” which is slow to get going but a page-turner at about the halfway mark.  It has strong elements of care in it at all levels of its human interactions which is the angle I am taking with my perspective on prisons.

 

B.  The next main thread, seaweeds, is the second branch of my current studies, has been much more rewarding.

 

 

  1.  My foray into moulding and casting started very well but ended in abject failure.  I tried to mould a seaweed holdfast = what look like the roots of the plant, but they were too intertwined and so impossible for me to mould, let alone cast.  It was at this point that I went down the 3D printing route.  I shall, perhaps, try again with a simpler object.

2.   Starting with an archive exploration at Torquay museum, I found actual seaweeds which had been dried and physically stuck and labelled into 2 volumes by a Victorian collector, Amelia Griffiths, in 1871.  Her studies raised awareness of the diversity of marine plant life at least in Torbay.  The examples Griffiths collected were rather small, with the longest collected being 60cm.  My focus, generated by my finds on Paignton beaches after storms at sea, is on how long some of these plants are.  They have measured up to 1.8m which, in my opinion, creates a vastly different picture of local marine life.

 

One entry fascinated me as I have not seen it in my collections:

What I like about it is the embroidery effect of the fan-like leaves.  It reminded me of  one of Antony Gormley’s sculptures that I liked and which, after my metalwork induction, I was keen to work on.

I might make a seaweed abstract, inspired by both these images, using metal rods, possibly copper which can go green when exposed to oxygen.  Dream!

 

3.   3D printing

This is the most magical find so far in the new skills exploration category.  I am excited to hear Jonathan Kay’s talk on 18th January at the RLB because not only does he do cyanotypes, but he also does 3D models of his landscapes!! My exploration started with a holdfast I collected from the beach after some storms at sea had brought in mountains of seaweed – see above.  I took it in to the Fabrication Studio in RLB and asked about making a 3D print of it.  Spencer said that I had to do an induction session first, which I did.  I then sent him photos of the holdfast and finally I took it in and asked if he could do a print of it.  He very kindly said that he could do a digital scan of it but that I had to do the print.

 

We have a 3D filament and jet printer at home so I asked Spencer if he could give me the file so that I could print it & he did:

I first did the brown one which I promptly dropped (on the carpet) and broke so I then printed the white one.  Because these are in plastic, not only do they they go counter to my concern for the environment, but they are also very brittle, so I had one printed in plant-based resin polymer.  It is much smoother and sturdier but it’s grey so I shall print it out in white or paint it.

 

4.   The next workshop which was to have an impact on my practice was the mono print session in the print workshop with patient and keen technician Helen.  I did what I was told, badly, but then decided I wanted to do some bark rubbing / printing.  I went outside Scott Building to the first tree in sight and rolled the paint-loaded roller over some tissue paper on the tree trunk and went inside.  I used my plant identification app to see what tree it was: an evergreen cork oak tree.  I then read up on it and discovered that the cork can be harvested every 6 years. The tree and cork bark in close-up:

What I saw once I was indoors was absolutely mesmerising.  

There were shapes that looked like insect wings, flowers, seed pods and stars.

I took photos of details that I liked:

In my photo manipulation suite, I then played around with the vertical and horizontal duplication of the prints and, after several options, decided on this one:

It looks so ephemeral and delicate that you would never imagine it had been made from an oak tree bark.

 

In the Christmas break I tried to replicate the outcome using 4 different rollers that I bought or borrowed and did not have the same success.  Once back in the workshop, I realised that not only the softness of the roller is important, but also my paint rolling technique was wrong: the paint I was using was far too thick.  The results of painting the same tree were promising:

5.   Combine 3D printing and monoprinting and this is what comes out:

I had sent my photo of the manipulated print to a company which generates lithophanes from photos and sends you the file which you then feed into the printer which prints the 3D version.  It is absolute magic!

 

 

6.   My manipulation took another turn.

I printed the photo I had sent off, printed music staves onto tracing paper and superimposed the staves over the bark print and made a music score which I have sent to my eldest daughter, who is at home recovering from an operation, to make musical sense out of it as she has studied music!

This I am finding super exciting!  It doesn’t have anything to do with seaweeds or prisons …yet!

 

7.   The next thread I want to bring in is some of the theory we have covered, particularly new materialisms in the short story we were asked to write for Essay 5 and which I am developing for my extended writing task.  I have become more and more involved in this piece which, unlike most of the others, DOES have seaweed in it:

The following is an extract from my reflection on why I am doing what I am:

Regardless of the answer, and being mindful of the wisdom of Ursula Le Guin and Donna Harroway, our current global existential crisis tells me that I need to be mindful of how I am using the world, its animals, plants and minerals.

Part of my project is to highlight what is going on below the waves in terms of its plant life.  I made a holdfast replica in plastic - but that was just to test the available technology. Now I plan to make it in plant-based resin.  Le Guin makes me ask myself why I am doing this - of course I can justify it in artistic terms = to help develop my project and expand the range of materials I can work with so that I can see what is best applicable to my work.

Time will tell if what I am doing is justified.  Will that be too late?  I hope my current course won’t take that long ;)

Le Guin also writes about our relationships which appear to be reciprocal and complex.  I am particularly aware of this in our media centred lives in which the internet makes us aware of the multiple connections in which information and experiences race wildly backwards and forwards and drag others along in their path thus complicating the interactions.

Le Guin identifies these connections as " simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or long-lasting." . This web of connections is not restricted to inter-personal experiences but involves "all beings - including what we generally class as things, objects."

This is interesting because at my recent tutorial, Anya, when I said I didn't know what I was going to do with my 3D print of my holdfast, asked if I had considered what an object is.  No, but Le Guin's idea of connectivity is a start.

The desiccated seaweed is part of another experiment I am exploring: recording the gradual decomposition of wet and dry seaweeds.  This stems from an article I read about the biochrome art of Renata Buziak.  She describes it as follows:

What is it? 

It is an image created through the Biochrome process developed to help you engage with the natural world.

What is a biochrome process? 

It is a process of image making developed by fusing organic and photographic materials over an extended period, and art-science research. A collaboration with nature.

In a video of her art form, Renata uses time-lapse video to record the decomposition of her aboriginal medicinal plant material and the emergence of all the fungi.

I am taking still images of my oar weed decomposing in water and hope to make a time-lapse record of it. 

These are 2 of the stills I have taken so far, one early on & the other 8 days later. The water medium is considerably cloudier in the second image and the oar weed is losing its strength.  There is also a film developing at the mouth of the vase – decomposing bits?

8.  I am  in conversation with a member of the marine biology staff to see how I can analyse what I am doing or if I should do it differently based on the equipment they have and which they will allow me to use.  I have written up my notes from my meeting with Dr Stacey De Amicis under "Seaweed: Research".

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9.  I am negotiating with a diver friend, Derek, to see when he can go down 4 metres to use the 360degree camera to film what is down there.  He said he could do it locally so he does not have to go out in a boat, and that he will capture the seagrass beds and other local seaweeds in situ.

 

          We now have to wait for the camera to be available and the sea conditions to

          be right: the temperature must be below 18 degrees to avoid the sudden 

          bloom of plankton and other flowering plants bursting out their seeds; the light

          must be bright enough to allow the camera to work; there must be no 

          turbulence to disturb the clarity of the water.

 

We have to make sure that both Derek and his diving buddy are free at the same time to do the shoot. 

This is a still from a 360 degree film we shot at our induction in October.

I attended a talk yesterday in the RLB lecture theatre and it seems that the photographer, Jonathan Kay, spoke right to my practice!  

I was intrigued and impressed by the public interest he engendered by having his Negative Mass cyanotype exposure in public over 3 days in the city centre.  What an excellent way of engaging with the public about your project!

What I took away from the talk:

1. to take photos of the sea bed.

2.  to use the electron microscope to photograph not only the seaweed cells under the microscope, but also frozen seawater.  

3. To get a digital camera microscope to photograph elements not only on the seaweed but also on the frozen seawater.

4.  Where Abigail Reynolds makes seaweed glass, I would like to make a vinyl panel with an image made with an electron microscope of my seaweeds or seawater ice.

5.  Can I make something REALLY BIG with seaweed?

The fact that I can retrieve all these images is a testament to the efficiency of my lucky archival system!  Thanks Mark Dion!

7th February 2023

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This is the text to accompany my extended essay "Et si ...?"

Donna Harroway: "Speculative Fabulation  is making a fable which holds wild facts - facts that won't hold still.  It is a worlding, full of animals / critters that don't exist, of adults or creatures of the imagination or it's a fantasy of an Ursula Le Guin.  SF is a seed, a point of eruption of my own work as a scholar."

Tentacular thinking: 

The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails.”

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Anthropocene: I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrong-headed and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures. 

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Capitalocene: Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both of the binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to Progress and its evil twin, Modernization. The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of. 

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Chthulucene:

... the Greek chthonios means “of, in, or under the Earth and the seas” — a rich terran muddle for SF, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fabulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. 

The Gorgons are powerful winged chthonic entities without a proper genealogy; their reach is lateral and tentacular; they have no settled lineage and no reliable kind (genre, gender), although they are figured and storied as female.

Because the deities of the Olympiad identified her as a particularly dangerous enemy to the sky gods’ succession and authority, mortal Medusa is especially interesting for my efforts to propose the Chthulucene as one of the big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with the trouble of our ongoing epoch. 

Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen — yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story.

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

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