Saturday 13 May 2023

Nina Simone's Gum

The hair clippings of St Clare of Assisi, the Basilica of Saint Clare: Assisi.

'Nina Simone's Gum' is a book by Warren Ellis. Entitled after the fact that Ellis had pulled the gum off the leg of a piano Nina Simone had played back in 1999, in what was to be Simone's last performance in England. It was twenty years later put on display as a relic; an object of great spiritual value; the book being about how something so small can form such powerful connections between people, it is, as the blurb says, 'a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality'. 

Nina Simone's Gum

I went to see Nina Simone at Birmingham Town Hall in 1969, she was astonishing. Memories of the event still move me, and when she sang 'Young Gifted and Black', I remember hairs standing up on the back of my neck as the mainly black audience rose to her words. It was my first real experience of what it meant to have a very different identity to that of a white, male anglo-saxon. I had just accepted things as they were, but on going to art college, I was finally beginning to wake up and discover that the world out there was a conflicted place and that what I took for granted, was a situation many others would see as a position of privilege.  Simone's performance was an unforgettable experience and I could easily see why something as humble as her discarded chewing gum could be so important to someone who had attended one of her concerts. 

This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them. This could be, as in the image that opens this post, a saint like Clare of Assisi, who's still golden shorn hair is kept to remind us of her piety or Jesus Christ; the nails from his crucifixion being energised with some sort of spiritual essence of his being. 

A Holy nail relic: Trier Cathedral 

But you don't have to be that special or saintly, anyone's spiritual essence can be passed on using a relic, the most common situation being when you are given an urn full of ashes after a cremation. I know of several families that keep their grandad's ashes in an urn sitting in a cupboard and every now and again they turn to those ashes and ask for grandad's help in supporting them through life's difficulties. The objects that become relics can also be very mundane, a tooth, a nail, a used discarded chewing gum, but in their very banality, they tell us a story about life, about how the most humble, overlooked object, has the potential to give physical form to spiritual things. 

The artist Alina Szapocznikow, used to use chewing gum to make sculptural ideas, and then photograph the results. 

Alina Szapocznikow, “Photosculpture” (1971)

These images also tap into the concept of the relic. The artist's traces becoming very like those of a lost saint, Szapocznikow's chewed and hand pulled tiny sculptures, now venerated as high art, become relics not unlike the ones we find preserved in glass vitrines in many Catholic churches. A relic works as some sort of externalised mind. Without their physical presence we would find it very difficult to think about the ideas associated with what relics stand for. The reason we need to make physical objects to carry our ideas, is because of the same reason, each art object in effect operating as an externalised thought, a concept made real, rather than remaining as a thought trapped inside a head.

You can also think about a drawing once it is completed as a type of relic. Its very materiality is a crystallised idea. We are intrigued by an original drawing and as we look closely at its hand made marks, we recreate in our minds the artist's touch and in turn we are touched by the idea of a certain combination of materials holding within itself an idea. When I am dead my drawings will have to talk for me. Mute like all relics, people will bring their own stories to them, therefore I hope my works on paper will have enough substance to them to allow for many possible stories to emerge and flourish, the drawings' very muteness hopefully offering others a silence within which to make their own sounds. 

A drawing from an old sketchbook

Whatever idea I had when making this drawing I have forgotten, but the specific combination of materials remain, the drawing holds its form, only slightly distorted by time, perhaps a little faded and the paper slightly flattened due to compression and dampness. It now operates as a relic, a frozen thought preserved in paper and ink, a type of fossil. If now framed behind glass and put on display, the framing begins to remove it even further from the world and heightens its iconic possibilities and begins the journey towards becoming a reliquary.

The frame within a frame

An empty reliquary frame 

The empty reliquary frame above is just waiting for a saint's toe or tooth to be mounted within its ornate surrounds. It is designed to give honorific value to whatever is placed within it. It needs something like Nina Simone's gum to complete it. In fact the gum was cast in silver by Hannah Upritchard, a London jeweller and the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester produced an intricately carved silver ring in its image. 

Hannah Upritchard: Silver casts of Nina Simone's Gum

I suppose this sequence of ideas has come to me because I'm about to retire and the library at Leeds Arts University is thinking of archiving some of my old sketchbooks. If they do and as I would hope, they keep them safe, one day they will seem to some future researcher as strange old relics of the past and my life will be a distant memory. It is unlikely I will have ever changed anyone's life in the way Nina Simone did, but on a more modest scale, perhaps some of my teaching or my drawings did help some people enrich their own lives and if anything of mine could be regarded as repositories of my spirit, it would be my sketchbooks.

Sketchbook idea evolving in relation to how my varicose veins feel

Glass leg votive in progress

See also: 

False starts Exhibition: An aspect of my work that reaches into the tradition of the votive









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