Tuesday 20 October 2020

Sculptural Vocabulary 1: Caught in the Mesh


'Particle Psychology': steel mesh, leather, ash, wood, ceramic


I went to Pound Arts in Corsham to document an installation piece of mine titled 'Particle Psychology'. Conveniently I had visited Devizes Archaeological Museum on the way and it prompted me to think about what I wanted to explore in this post. I am thinking about how sculpture can involve creating and using material vocabularies which sometimes develop over a long period of time. What gives a particular combination and use of materials resonance? 
 
In the museum I was drawn in by the small but significant artefacts such as the earliest known piece of glass found in Britain, the neolithic tattooing equipment and the beautiful miniature axe pendants, which I would happily wear if I could.
 
When making a sculpture you may be led by many factors other than the use value or structural properties of the materials. Your choice may  be influenced by the associative potential of a material and its ability to conjure a particular era or context. By combining materials from contexts that are not usually associated, crafted and sculpted objects can lead us on new paths of association, providing something new in relation to the bank of objects we have already seen. 
 
That is what I found myself thinking about when I made the piece. I was thinking how we mostly imagine invisible particles through the methods that are used to measure or protect from them - such as masks and filters. Or in the case of pollution through the effect over time that a substance has on the stone fronts of buildings. The steel mesh that I used to make the mask-like objects caught my attention because metal is included in what we think of as the 'neolithic' vocabulary of materials, alongside ceramics, rock and bone. However, the way the metal has been processed into tiny, tight, regular gridded mesh also speaks of industrial processing. I think I selected the material for that particular combination of affinity and dislocation. 
 
It also has an amazing shimmery quality and is attractive to the eye but unpleasant to imagine covering the face. Sensory resonance can occur through heightened or combined forms of tactility, or the imagined tactility of the materials. Tactility and surface texture can also be closely related to notions of attraction and repulsion that we attach to materials; their qualities of roughness, smoothness, slipperiness or dryness. 
 
In my next Sculptural Vocabulary post I'll reflect on notions of material hierarchy and value and how they impact on my thinking and practice as a sculptor.
 
 
'Particle Psychology': steel mesh, leather, ash, wood, ceramic









'Particle Psychology': steel mesh, leather, ash, wood, ceramic



'Particle Psychology': steel mesh, leather, ash, wood, ceramic





'Particle Psychology': steel mesh, leather, ash, wood, ceramic


Friday 22 May 2020

Particle Psychology & Carbon Skies

Particle Psychology, installation shot

I thought I would take the chance to reflect a bit on the piece I made for the exhibition 'Incendiary', which would have opened at Pound Arts in Corsham in March, but was closed on the evening of install.

Titled Particle Psychology, the piece came out of research I did into early examples of hearths and burnt waste on neolithic sites, and current exploration in to particulate pollution. I was interested in taking the long view of our history of exposure to carbon and other particulates in the air. This research also coincided with the atrocious bush fires that were happening in Australia. Experiencing this from afar through the media, the most pervasive images were of the orange and deep yellow skies. The changing colour of the sky engendered a primeval reaction to this environmental event. Although it felt counter-intuitive to me that the carbon particles created by the fires should make the  sky yellow rather than grey or black, what seemed to be intuitive is that when the sky changes colour, this signals a warning of wide-scale change and threat.


Particle Psychology, installation shot

Tim Smedley's book 'Clearing the Air' makes some of the complicated science behind particulates and air pollution more accessible. He also considers the exposure neolithic people had to carbon particles from hearth fires and drying kilns in confined interior spaces, and the fact that this can be detected in the lungs of neolithic human remains.  I found an article in National Geographic about an amazing set of carved limestone masks from the neolithic period, unearthed in Israel, which is the site of the earliest suspected prehistoric hearth (defined as a place used repeatedly for fire, rather than as a one-off event). I thought it would be interesting to use the mask, obviously an important cultural form to neolithic humans, as a way to reference the carbon culture of this time period.

With distant and nearby focal points in mind, I wanted to use a sculptural vocabulary combining both 'ancient' and 'synthetic' materials. In my next post I will explore how this vocabulary came together and reflect on how it could develop in future.


Particle Psychology, installation shot