Over the weekend I went to see the 'Material Environments' exhibition at the Leeds Tetley for the final time. This is an exhibition I have visited several times because it both demonstrates how to build an exhibition around very particular spaces and how to embed a theme across a variety of artists working in quite diverse ways. As someone focused on drawing and with an interest in ceramics I was fascinated by the work of Phoebe Cummings. She makes organic ceramic environments using unfired clay. In order to preserve the work she was doing, the whole area had been encased in a temporary polythene structure, which meant that you had to enter the space as you would a field hospital operation area or temporary on site police forensic lab via a pull aside transparent plastic doorway. Her title 'A ripening surveillance' suggesting perhaps poly-tunnels for forced plant growth, conjoined with a paranoid need for constant vigilance. Cummings draws with clay, linking one botanical idea to another as she combines both hand made and shallow relief cast forms into imagined landscapes of 3D drawings of seemingly alien flora. The fact that you had to enter her space in the way you did, emphasised its alien nature, reminding me of the way in the film ET the government operatives sealed off the domestic middle class home environment, thus signifying that it was now potentially toxic. The alien is always seen as dangerous. We have this week been reminded of how potent the nerve agent novichok is, and images of makeshift plastic environments have again been dominating the media, as police seek to find the source of novichok contamination. Cummings in making her triffid like constructions reminds us of the continuing unsettling presence of things we don't really understand. Clay, that primeval substance, the basic building material out of which according to the Bible God created man, still has a deep resonance as something that comes up from the bottom of river beds and allows us to think about a chthonic inception of forms. As it states in Job 10.8-12, 'Remember that you have made me like clay,' but so is a golem also a clay made creature. As a material clay holds within itself infinite possibilities, like all forms of drawing, the maker needs to first of all attune themselves to the nature of the interrelationship between a material and the way it can be shaped.
Phoebe Cummings: A Ripening Surveillance (2018)
Richard Long encounters clay on his walks through the natural world. He collects the clay from river beds and uses it to form hand drawn images on the walls of galleries, thus reminding us of the tension that exists between the geometric structures erected by people and the constant grinding of materials down into mud, which will eventually be the fate of all earthly materials both human and non human made. Location is very important to him and his works remind us that what is in the earth has had a powerful impact on how human beings have survived.
Richard Long
Richard Long: detail
Richard Long: Cornish china clay on wall
In the image directly above, the fact that Long is using Cornish china clay is a very important aspect of the meaning of the drawing. China clay is called 'China Clay' because porcelain was for hundreds of years only available from China, and kaolin, (China Clay) is a fine grained white clay found in Cornwall, a fact that was responsible for the development of Cornish clay mining. The drawing suggests the map of an underground labyrinth, its simplicity however suggesting a symbol for a labyrinth, rather than a reflection of the complexity of real underground mining tunnels, such as those set out in the map below.
US Geological survey: Shafts and tunnels of
the Comstock mines
A coin from Knossos depicting the labyrinth
If you compare the image on the coin above to Long's work, you can see that they are part of the same image family. The coin depicts a symbol for the labyrinth, again all complexity and asymmetry is removed in order to facilitate the clarity of the design.
The
artist Yusuke Asai uses locally sourced clays and dirt to construct his complex
mythological images, which he develops into immersive environments by drawing across floors and walls. He is
interested in the fact that, “Seeds grow in it and it is
home to many insects and microorganisms”. It is, he states “A ‘living'
medium.”
Yusuke Asai
"I accepted the ephemeral nature of dirt as a medium from the moment I started painting with it. Once dry, paint cannot be wiped away, but with the addition of water dirt can be removed from a surface. I have been doing this type of earth painting since 2008 and most of these works have already disappeared! There is a desire for artwork to be permanent, but to try and keep it forever would mean that my painting would become unnatural. When I erase the painting it is sad, but within the context of the natural world, everything is temporary".
Yusuke Asai
Yusuke Asai
Asai taps into his own subconscious when creating these drawings, drawings that sit somewhere between a sort of imagined folk art and the images of a previously undiscovered culture. This is world creation at a vey high level. By using mud, clay and dirt, (dirt when wet is mud) Asai is able to feel much more connected to nature and he accepts the fact that his work will only be temporary. When I went to see the work of Phoebe Cummings this weekend it was already cracking and falling apart, all of these artists embrace entropy. As soon as any drawing or other artwork is made it is beginning to slowly fall apart, but this process is usually so slow that we don't notice it. However by embracing this as part of the artwork the artist can open out the connections that the work makes into the natural life path of those who experience it.
Rudolf Arnheim wrote a classic essay on these issues; 'Entropy and Art: An essay on Disorder and Order', which was an attempt to reconcile the contradiction between our need for order and the fact that everything is in reality in a state of entropy or chaos. Clay it would seem to me embodies within itself all of the issues that Arnheim unpicks. It comes from the soil, or from river beds, in many ways it is sourced by removing it from the chaos of nature. It has an ability to be formed when wet into a variety of forms because of its plasticity, and is hard and brittle on drying. The processes of creative formation are flexible and malleable, but once the forming stops, the clay begins to dry and become brittle, in its rigidity it becomes fragile and suspect to entropy.
So finally what am I getting at here? Bergson used the concept ‘élan vital’ to describe a force inside all living beings that motivated them to continue, what we might call 'the life force'. Bergson was suggesting that life itself was a creative process, something that Prigogine calls a self-organizing dissipative structure, driven by non-equilibrium flows of energy. I.e. the active forming process is a self-organising one, one that reflects the possibilities in the organisational structures of life itself. This ‘élan vital’ it could then be argued is something that runs through everything, not just living things and that all materials have the potential to be formed into others, they just need to be in interaction with whatever they find themselves in contact with.
If you want to read a much more scientific description of how this works an excellent article is "Scientific Élan Vital: Entropy Deficit or Inhomogeneity as a Unified Concept of Driving Forces of Life in Hierarchical Biosphere Driven by Photosynthesis" by Naoki Sato.
Brie Ruals
Brie Ruals is an artist that digs holes, piles up earth, sits in the surf and generally embeds herself into the earth from which she sources her clay. Her whole body is involved in clay drawing, and anyone interested in this type of work should research her.
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