Fragments

November 4, 2014

I spent almost the whole of last week at West Dean on a short course with Michael Brennand-Wood. The park and gardens were in their full autumn glory. Early morning walks started in fog or mist and ended in sunshine. I love the way the mist obscures background detail and emphasises outlines - like a Chinese painting ... but with sheep.

The rest of each day was spent working intensely in the workshop studio. The theme of Brennand-Wood's course was subtraction, erasure and conjecture - what happens when information is taken away or physical details removed or rearranged? At what point does this process of subtraction result in something new? Now, this post isn't directly about the workshop - I will be digesting what I did and what I learned from that for a while I think. However the work we did (mine and others') plus discussions within the group did lead me to think about fragments.

“Fragment:
1. A part broken off or detached from the whole
2. Something incomplete; an odd bit or piece
3. To break up into fragments ...

In order for an object or form to be perceived as a fragment there must be a clear sense of a whole. ...
There is an instinctive tendency in humans to establish a relationship between elements wherever possible. Even subtle clues are often sufficient to trigger connections between one unit and another. ...
Fragments introduce the notion of mystery or puzzle-solving.”

— Tim McCreight "Design Language"

Fragments have a particular aesthetic - think of ruined buildings, patched or worn textiles, broken ceramic or corroded metal. These things have a past. And it is the signs of wear, age or use that often attract us. But our need to make sense of them - to fit things back together, whether in our imagination or in reality - can create its own problems of interpretation. In the absence of complete information, we make assumptions, guess and impose our own beliefs about how the original thing should look. Sometimes this will create a new identity for the object we're trying to reconstruct. Sometimes this will exaggerate certain features, taking them out of context in a way that actually makes the object more abstract.

In the same way, our minds record fragments of information and we piece them together in the way that makes sense to us. This applies to how we experience being in the landscape too. When we are actually there we are immersed and surrounded by sensory impressions. But in order to process this experience, we focus on particular fragments of those impressions - specific sights, sounds, smells - we remember a place in fragments. Or so it seems to me. And likewise, the photos I take and the objects I pick up preserve physical fragments of that experience.

Found objects are usually themselves fragments - things that have been used and discarded; things that have been weathered, shed or dropped as part of a natural process of ageing or growth. Part of their attraction is sometimes that physical connection with something - the animal's bone; the bird's feather, a place. But the finding can be as important as the object. It's not the same when someone gives me a stone or a shell as opposed to when I find it myself. The objects I find are associated directly with a place and time. Sometimes very specifically, so that it is enough to look at the object to remember other details about the day I found it. Whereas when someone gives me something they have found, the association is with the person, the circumstances of the giving and whatever they tell me about it. So the found object is not independent of the context in which it is found.

These thoughts are fragmentary. I can sense that they are interconnected in ways I don't fully understand - part of a larger idea. Meanwhile I am looking at images of objects that are fragmented or pieced together from many smaller pieces. We'll see if this leads somewhere.

Stone books

May 2, 2014

“Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.”

— John McPhee "In Suspect Terrain" (1983)

We think of stones as the epitome of permanence. We use expressions such as "set in stone", "heart of stone", "solid as rock" when we want to convey that something is fixed, unyielding, impervious to influence. But this is not the reality. It simply reflects the difference between our human perception of time and the unimaginable amount of time involved in geological processes.

I've been reading about the work of Ilana Halperin, specifically her exhibition "The Library" for National Museums Scotland last year. Ilana trained as a stone-carver but became interested in this relationship between geological phenomena and human life-spans. "The Library" included agates that were formed during a volcanic eruption in the year the artist was born; minerals that record the impact of a meteorite on the Earth's crust millions of years ago; etchings on "books" of mica that are millions of years old and sculptures made by the artist using geological processes in caves and geothermal springs. What is so inspiring about this is the way these works overturn our perception of the relationship between geology, biology and time.

I went back to Robert Macfarlane's "Mountains of the Mind" and re-read one of my favourite chapters - "The Great Stone Book", and particularly this passage:

“The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called “deep time” - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger physical projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realisation that you do exist - as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.””

— Robert Macfarlane " Mountains of the Mind" (2003)

But the other aspect of Ilana Halperin's work that intrigued me was the specific history of the minerals she used. And I began to think about my own collection of stones. These are predominantly flint, picked up over the course of several years of walking along North Norfolk beaches. Each one was originally selected primarily for its marks, colour or other physical features but now I was curious what those marks might signify in geological terms.

The "outside" of the same piece - the "cortex", stained with iron perhaps.

I have learned that flint is a form of quartz (silicon dioxide) that occurs as nodules in sedimentary rocks such as chalk. It is derived from material in the bodies of marine organisms, the skeletons of which mix with chalk and organic matter in sediment on the ocean floor. It is thought that chemical changes within the sediment, perhaps related to the decay of organic matter, cause the silica to accumulate and form concretions within the chalk. In some of my flints there are mysterious veins or fragments which thus may be residual traces of minerals or organisms trapped inside the stone during this process of formation.

Inside the nodule, the stone is usually dark grey and glass-like, while the outside is often covered by a coarse, white layer, called a cortex. The cortex looks a little like chalk but is actually quartz. So, many of the patterns in my flints have been formed where the cortex has been worn away by the sea. Lots of them have a pale bluish tinge - maybe where the cortex has worn down to the thinnest "veil" over the darker interior of the stone? Many also contain other colours - black, yellow, rust - which are apparently traces of iron and other metal oxides, sulphides, hydroxides or organic material.

Knowing all this, the stone I picked up on the beach becomes a document. It holds the memory of organisms and processes stretching back millions of years and is itself part of the ongoing geological history of the Norfolk coast. The marks and traces - which remind me of maps, drawings or other symbols within my personal experience - have their own significance. And, from the point I picked it up, I arrested its ongoing transformation - if I had left it on the beach, the sea would have continued to wear it down. Now it sits on my desk in stillness, removed from its geological context, as an object of study.

I'm thinking about doing more with these - studying and drawing the marks more closely with a view to generating more ideas for imagery and marks on cloth. At the moment, though my studio is given over to making new work. I have had a fantastically productive week and my studio wall looked like this (when the sun was out earlier this week). It feels good.

Memory on cloth

January 31, 2014

The conversation usually goes something like this:

They look puzzled. “What is shibori?”

I try. A Japanese term. For a range of techniques that involve manipulating the cloth and then binding or stitching it to create a resist before dyeing.

…

I give in. “Like tie-dye”.

Light dawns.

Techniques involving bound or tied resists are found in many parts of the world, including India, West Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, South America. In Japan, they date back to at least the 8th century and probably beyond. Sometime in the 14th century, Japanese dyers also worked out how to make stitched resists and how to protect selected areas of the cloth from the dye – opening up a whole new range of pattern-making possibilities.

There is no equivalent word for “shibori” in English. The closest description would be “shaped-resist dyeing”. “Tie-dye”, with all its rainbow-dyed-t-shirt associations (in my mind, anyway), doesn’t begin to capture the range and sophistication of techniques covered by the Japanese term. Yoshiko Wada, who wrote two books on the subject, describes over sixty variations and there are certainly more. There are people who have dedicated their life not just to shibori but to just one type of shibori. And there are Western artists who have learned Japanese and studied with Japanese masters to perfect their own interpretations.

Against that background I don’t claim to be a shibori artist. But I do use shibori techniques. Initially I taught myself from Wada’s book, “Shibori: the inventive art of Japanese shaped resist dyeing”. Her instructions are so meticulous that, with patience and lots of experimentation, it wasn’t too difficult to achieve interesting results. Other books and courses (most recently with Jan Myers Newbury, who taught me arashi shibori) and lots more experimentation have developed my understanding.

Images from Yoshiko Wada's book

Pleated and stitched resists are the method I like best (see this). Depending how I space the pleats and the stitches I can achieve a range of linear patterns – from fine, straight, parallel lines to wavy, broken ripples. I also use arashi (pole wrap) and itajime (clamp resist) techniques. And shibori lines over cloth that has already been painted or screen-printed with thickened dye add a whole other set of possibilities.

There are shibori techniques that can be done quickly but stitched techniques are usually slow. It takes me 30 to 40 minutes to pleat and stitch a quarter metre of cloth. What makes it worth the trouble, are the characteristic soft edges and organic marks that result. They resemble ripples in the sand, the grain of wood, reflections in the water. The nature of the process means that the dye only reaches the parts of the cloth that are left exposed. So, when you undo it, the marks provide a record of the folds and creases, which mimic the processes that shape and mark surfaces in nature.

Found shibori

It is possible, with experience, to work out how a shibori-dyed cloth must have been folded by studying the marks – “it is the memory of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth” (Wada). Memory on cloth – with all the metaphorical possibilities that offers.

What I like is that even though I have quite a lot of control over how I manipulate the cloth, in the end I have to let go of the process and allow the cloth and the dye bath to do as they like. I never know exactly what I will get and that’s half the fun. As Wada says, “Chance and accident … give life to the shibori process.”

More about this: World Shibori Network

The plan of what might be

January 8, 2014

“Sometimes he feels as though the plan he is holding in his head is so fragile that the slightest jolt might make it come apart. In the five months that have passed since he stood before it at St Gall, the fabric has become eroded as though some earthly edifice had been left out in the rain. Even on the journey back he felt that he was losing it. … With every breath the memory becomes fainter. …”

— Charles Ferneyhough "Pieces of Light" Ch. 7

The Plan of St Gall is a manuscript, "five sheets of parchment sewn together with green thread", depicting an entire Benedictine monastic complex. It was never built and scholars argue about the original design, purpose and nature of the plan. Ferneyhough is interested in it as a possible example of a mnemonic device, using the Method of Loci , which uses visualisation to create a framework to organise and recall information. In this method, which was known to the Greeks and Romans, the individual memorises the layout of some building or place, linking the items he wishes to recall to distinctive features of that place. When he wishes to remember, meditate or reflect upon the material, he literally walks through the place in his imagination, allowing the features and layout of the imaginary building to awaken memories and associations. He "sees" his thoughts.

Ferneyhough's point is that this is a view of memory as something more than simply memorising facts - it is a creative, constructive process in which the meditator (quoting the 12th century Hugh of St Victor) "delights to run freely through open space … touching on now these, now those connections among subjects" in order to generate new thoughts as much as remember existing ones.

More on this idea - Mary Carruthers "The Book of Memory"