test background copy — The Journal of Art & Ecology Vol.4

I am a sculptor, I suppose. I like making things. Out of clay, or grass or wool. For the past year, I have been thinking about life cycles and working with ephemeral materials such as unfired clay - to create sculptures which, at the end of their lives, are able to deteriorate and die. The final and perhaps the core gesture of my work was to put it all back outside, from the material sites, letting them to fade and melt back into the earth. Everything I made this year is gone now.

When I first considered how I would approach presenting my work online, I found myself struggling with the question ‘How can I use this digital platform to show the work I made this year, without simply documenting it?’ Documentation, in the way that I was imagining it, felt somewhat like immortalisation. If I were to immortalise my work, I would contradict the essential principle of mortality behind the sculptures I made. So I have decided to experiment and explore the concept of documentation, trying to find methodologies which feel pertinent to my work.

I have hundereds of images from my degree show, but putting those on here as they are feels stagnant, so I want to somehow ghostify them. I am interested in how I can digitally mimic deterioration. Deletion, file quality reduction, erasure, pixelation, dithering. I am not doing anything too complicated but instead exploring the simple digital techniques through which I can turn my photos into something more fragmentary and ghost-like.

Here, I used the lasso tool in preview to remove parts of the photograph, before increasing the exposure to white-out certain areas and reducing the resolution of the image down from 72 to 8dpi

When I read through our text messages, the voice, his voice, your voice, is the same. I can hear you speaking to me. There is something of you there, but so much is missing. It is like speaking to a ghost.

My explorations making ephemeral sculptures have led me to consider the commodification of art. To allow a piece of work to be destroyed makes it impossible to commodify as there is nothing left to be owned. Though my decision to make the works ephemeral did not stem from ideas of anti-commodity, the perishability of the work became a small rebellion. A refusal. Disintegrating the works enforced that the point of the pieces was not in their ability to be commodified. Documentation raises a similar question. I make the choice to not show my actual pieces in this journal, as I want to reiterate that they did not exist in order to be documented and become some form of commodity for me. They did not exist to generate ‘useful exposure.’

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“Performance's being...becomes itself through disappearance.” - Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

I am sad to let go of the work I made but at the same time, grief is the point. It is what made them feel special and real. What made them feel alive. There is something quite magic about knowing that they have melted away back into the world and that in some form they persist, as they transform and are unlocked out of physicality and into the form of ghosts. Perhaps somewhere there is a small indent in the grass where the pieces once sat. Or a small patch of soil with a little more clay than the patches around it. Or a seed who has fallen from the clay arm I sculpted embedded in the ground, now dormant, waiting for spring.

These creatures and figures were ephemeral beings who’s lives ended with a final and crucial performance. Their dissappearance. They dissappeared into other bodies, Earth’s bodies, melting back into sand and clay and plants and seeds as their small and tired bodies were released.

To deteriorate an image digitally is to lose information - it is to make it smaller. Smallness is a principle I have been working with for some time. I enjoy making raw, simple work which references the materials from which it is made. Thinking about this digitally, I find image deterioration through pixel reduction interesting as visible pixels spark a conversation between the image and the machine which built it. In some ways, it feels as though high resolution images seek to distance themselves from their materials and their tools. Through their magnificent clarity, the viewer is transported into a recreated reality where they do not need to consider how the photos were taken. The tool is not the interesting point. In my opinion, it is the materials and the tools which create the most exciting narratives. I do not think they should be ignored.

There is also an ethical environmental reasoning behind a rejection of high definition. Creating and working with huge files is energy intensive - a larger file requires more energy. When your laptop is crashing and can’t handle the size of what you are trying to open, it begs the question - is it really necessary for it to be so big???

Small is Beautiful.

Memory is in it’s nature fragmentary, so working from my memory to describe or depict the sculptures feels like another way to ‘ghostify’ my documentations. There is also something of the fragmentation and innaccuracy of memory that I find comfortingly human.

“The description itself does not reproduce the object, it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost.” - Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

drawing from memory

I made a small cat with six legs out of clay, inpsired by Louise Bourgeois’ self portrait as a cat with six legs. I used two daffodil seeds as the eyes. They are small and black and hard and mishapen like eggs. I used cow parsely seeds to make some fur on her back. The cow parsely seeds look like fennel seeds but darker and more pointed. One of her legs fell off and so did her tail but I stuck them back together with superglue.

She sat on a big smooth stone in the show. I gave her pride of place because she was my favourite. She was the hardest to part with, but now she is outside and maybe one day she will become an outrageous daffodil.

It is strange to witness how much a person can change from within the supposed stasis of death through the collective memories of other people.

I went to a talk by an artist called El Morgan. She talked about a project she was working on with the V&A, looking at the insects which find their way into the museum to eat away at the clothes behind the glass. I found it fascinating and hilarious to consider the great lengths that conservationists go to in order to prevent this deterioration. And a strange comfort to be reminded that even despite their desperate attempts to conserve, conserve, conserve, the insects still find their way in. Their inevitable success made the whole idea of a museum look silly. A little smaller and less powerful.

At the British museum, I saw a small and ancient God sculpted out of terracotta. It was tiny, small enough to fit into the palm of a child and its face had been worn completely away. It had been smoothed by thumbs, who had touched it’s face in prayer. I was so sad to see it hidden behind the glass, held by a cold metal bracket. No thumbs allowed. It had been frozen.

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”

- Ursula K Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea