Saturday, 15 November 2025

A linear enjambement

Rosemarie McGoldrick: 'Animalcules IV' (2025)

An enjambement in verse is the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line. For instance the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, is constructed in such a way that everything depends upon a continuation of the first line, therefore the first line ends without punctuation, so that the thought continues into the next line; thus creating a sense of flow.

William Carlos Williams
XXII from Spring and All (1923)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a short haiku like poem that makes us aware of how objects work upon our personal sense of a visual poetry.

The line that continues is also something that can be purely visual. Rosemarie McGoldrick has an exhibition of her work on at the Centre for Recent Drawing at the moment and she uses a sense of enjambement in her drawn images depicting microscopic forms of imagined plankton and geometric krill. She is another example of an artist trying to visualise the invisible and I was particularly interested in her work because of the idea of enjambement. When I was looking at permeable boundaries, such as the ones that surround an amoeba, I was trying to visualise how the body of the amoeba was open and flexible, becoming at times part of the surrounding environment and at other times seeming to reassert itself, switching from one state to another. I saw in McGoldrick's images a possibility of a type of visual language using a linear enjambement, that could allow me to redraw microscopic and human sized forms in such a way that they were interconnected much more clearly into their environment and to each other. It also fitted very well with my earlier thoughts about lines as symbols of invisible forces.

Two stages of relationships between bacteria, feelings, their human hosts and other things

Lines of relationship are constantly shifting and when trying to visualise an embodied complex of interoceptual feelings, some areas are just blank. In the image above the black blobs were drawn as indicators of unknowns that still have complex relationships between all the other aspects of a being situated in an environment. One issue I have also had to think about in these type of images is how power is depicted. I have been looking towards the depiction of what is sometimes called a 'flat ontology' or sets of equal relationships between things. However I'm also aware that as soon as we focus on something it has more power in our minds over other things, that then move into the background as we shift our attention away from them. For instance in the image above the form moving into the frame from the left hand side is weightier than the more complex form situated in the middle of the image. The connections between are though drawn as if they are of equal weight. Perhaps my thoughts can be clarified by referring to another image that uses similar lines to depict a relationship.

Mesmerism

The invisible power of mesmerism is represented in the image above as another example of a male exerting power over a female. However I'm more interested in the lines of force being rather like the strings attached to a puppet.

Although the hand of the puppeteer is usually thought of as a means of control and the strings the means by which that control is asserted, you can see it as being a relationship that goes both ways, the puppet in effect also directs the puppeteer. Connections go both ways.

It is however Jorinde Voigt's use of lines to express relationships that I reference in my own drawings, as her images are reflections upon the transience of experience and the impossibility of actually recording it. In her drawings I see a glimpse of Cézanne's struggle to draw how he saw; as in Cézanne, there is a beauty in Voigt's work that emerges in relation to her seeking to pinpoint life's ever changing patterns.

Jorinde Voigt

The drawings that were on display at this year's Turner Prize exhibition by Nnena Kalu were also a type of linear enjambement. In her case the drawings were all repeated, the continuation of the sentence beyond the end of a line, being accomplished by picking up a swirling linear thought and doubling it. Her drawings seem very much about her own energy, about her body's movement and a celebration of it. Although related in form to some of Voigt's drawings, Kalu's feel less of an emotional dilemma, more a celebration of her existence than a struggle to affirm it.

Nnena Kalu

Nnena Kalu's doubling reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg's Factum 1 and 2.

Robert Rauschenberg: Factum 1 and 2: 1957

Factum 1 and Factum 2 are nearly identical, both using the same mixed-media techniques, of collage and paint on canvas. Rauschenberg's doubling, is this case is more a commentary on art's originality and uniqueness, paint never dripping in exactly the same way, every abstract expression being an original feeling. However the style of collage next to free paint marks, makes each 'combine' out to be a 'unique' Rauschenberg. Nnena Kalu's drawings are similar in that they are not exact copies, but close enough to at first sight be seen as identical doubles. Rauschenberg's approach being more cerebral, whilst I feel Kalu has found her way more instinctively. All of these attempts to meditate on the nature of the creative act involve in one way or another the continuation of a communication beyond an initial setting out of what is to be communicated. They are like hair extensions, attached to the starting point, but going much further, becoming something new in the process.

Jorinde Voigt drawing as abstraction and metaphor

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

The emotional line

A straight line

Saturday, 8 November 2025

The art of memory

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

I was thinking about Frances Yate's wonderful book, 'The Art of Memory' the other day. I haven't read it for many years but I was reminded of it because not long ago the artist Rosie Vohra had been asked to make a personal selection for exhibition within the Leeds Arts University library and she had chosen an artist's book that I made over 40 years ago, 'An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness'. I wrote the text for it at a time when I was under the influence of Yates' book and some of the images directly reflect the types of structures she used as illustrations in the book. Looking at the images again I was reminded of the fact that I was also trying to make sense of computer technology. We had been trying out a new type of wax printer, that took wax coated paper sheets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and ran them one after the other through a series of rollers that passed underneath a heater, whilst at the same time thousands of pins pushed down on the sheets in the areas designated by your design, that had been converted into CMYK separations, thus transferring the wax to the print paper. It was a clumsy process and we only ever had that one printer and it was never replaced. However, because there were now four layers of wax, there was a certain richness to the surfaces laid down and I wanted to make use of that. The final images were printed off and bound together with a text that I had typeset also using a computer and that I thought was it. At the time I thought it was a very good piece of work, but now on re-examining the book I realise that I ought to have bound glassine paper into the book between pages, because over the years the wax has begun to rub off onto the facing pages. However the fact that the book was out on display gave me a chance to photograph it and of course rethink what I might be able to do if I revisited the idea.

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

Frances Yates introduced me to several ideas that have cropped up again and again in my work; in particular because memory enhancement was part of rhetoric training and rhetoric was about getting your ideas across to other people in memorable ways. Something that as an artist I'm constantly having to think about and as a former lecturer who used to introduce students to communication theory, I owe it to myself to always remain aware of these issues.

Playing with the idea of what comes where in terms of a visual hierarchy

Since making the book, I have become much more interested in animism and ideas that touch upon a 'flat ontology' or level playing field, when we come to look at our relationships with other things. The medieval idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, elements (fire, water, etc.) and finally, inanimate objects like rocks at the bottom, is still in many ways how human beings think of the world and how it relates to them. Perhaps because of the spread of atheism, God and angels no longer have pride of place, but that often means that we humans then take top spot. In my watercolour image above, a cow has reached the top of the stairway but is about to fall down, leaving a field of wheat in top spot. I was playing with hierarchies, trying to subvert the order of things as usually pictured by humans.

However going back to Yates and her explication of how memory training was used, in particular in relation to Cicero's work on rhetoric, one of the big issues was making images that were startling in their appearance and also linked to what you want to remember by some sort of likeness. For instance, testis is a Latin word for “witness” and was used in Cicero's time in relation to witnessing one's manhood, therefore the words testify, testimonial and testament share a common etymology with the word testicle. Cicero at one point suggests that in a speech, if you want to remember that now is the time to speak about certain legal matters, you could mentally place a giant pair of testicles at a particular spot within a building that you were in your mind walking through, to help you remember the various components of your speech. It's a good image and one I must try out as a drawing at some point. We have all at one time or another tried to remember stuff and have realised that we can do this much easier if we can find a link to something else, especially a link that also takes a memorable shape and locates what we are trying to remember in a pictured space that you can mentally hold in your mind. For instance; if you want to remember a shopping list, you can visualise each item in its place on the shelves of a supermarket. Then you can picture yourself walking through the various aisles and picking up what you need. A renaissance memory theatre operates in a similar way; theatres, such as the Globe, were places most people knew, just as a supermarket is now. Therefore in people's minds they could visualise the structure. Aisles and rows of seating could be set out in a way we are all familiar with and to this day we still go to a theatre or cinema, expecting to make our way to row H, seat 12 etc. It was a space that was easily cross referenced and particular spots pinpointed. Within this space, you could then place the various things you wanted to remember. However certain theorists at the time, such as Giulio Camillo, went further and decided that they could control the system and give it an overall structure that related to that idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchical system, that fixed into place and ordered all things.

Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

This is how Frances Yates describes Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre;

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades."

My present day version would be the memory supermarket, shelves stacked with knowledge packets instead of cereals or frozen foods, the fresh food aisles being now places to find new untested ideas, the cleaning products section perhaps devoted to philosophy and ways of thinking, such as the use of Occam's Razor. The bread shelves might be devoted to staple knowledge and the cake section where you might find titbits of information. The science of electro-magnetic fields might begin with the electrical goods section, whilst chemistry was located in the cooking supplies area and biology located where potted plants are. I think you get the drift.

James Joyce was fascinated by Giordano Bruno, who was one of the inventors of the art of memory. In Ithaca, the 17th part of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stops “chanting” a Jewish “anthem… in consequence of defective mnemotechnic”; a reminder that in his mind Joyce was both trying to bridge between the everyday and the mythic and build a memory structure in order to do this. He uses everyday events as a series of triggers to reference Homer's Odyssey; this final chapter of Ulysses recounts the very mundane events that happen as Leopold Bloom takes Stephen Dedalus home to number 7 Eccles Street for a cup of cocoa and to discuss the night's experiences; the chapter's title being an allusion to Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. Joyce suggests that every day is a journey and in its own way that journey can be as eventful as the voyages of Ulysses.

The chapters of Ulysses in their own way are also therefore a type of memory structure, the important issue for myself being that everyday events and things can be used to help us think about big issues. I have written a blog post about the hand as a memory system, (as always check out the 'see also' section at the end of each post), a reminder of how much of our thinking is embodied.
The linking of things by finding connections is also something that can be used in the construction of magic and is the reason ritual objects have the power they have. In order to work, magic objects must have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning, the contact if not directly physical, usually being a likeness of some sort. This process is termed the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. It can also operate by 'touch' which is a very physical connection. For instance a witch doctor could curse the ground that you might walk on; if so you will need protection, to stop that curse getting into your body. This is why historically in India and China and in many other cultures, people used to wear ankle bracelets. A curse would need to pass up and through the ankle, in order to get into the torso, which is the seat of all our vital organs and a charm bracelet worn around the ankle could prevent this. The bracelet also acting as a physical reminder of the need to be mindful of psychic attacks.

My work developing contemporary votives at one time overlapped with the design of charms, each one a response to a conversation about someone's worries. The charm bracelet above was designed as a type of three dimensional memory object, each charm shaped to reassure the wearer that some sort of psychic protection was in place. Gradually I was becomming aware of things like memory beads, rosaries and South American quipu, all external to the body and operating as recording or memory devices that began with touch and yet were also to be seen. They were of course operating as external brains.

References:

Barker, G. (2023) Votives and Charm Bracelets Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects. In: Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body: Palgrave Macmillan, London

Joyce, J. (2010) Ulysses Wordsworth Editions

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press

Yates, F. (2014) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition London: Routledge

Yates, F. (2014) The Art of Memory London: Bodley Head

See also:

Connecting the singularity

Memory drawing and hands

Faraday's lines of force

Magic

Deer teeth, perception and symbolic language

Votives and charm bracelets

Drawing and communication theory

Knots

Saturday, 1 November 2025

Rafts, plinths and islands

If you type into Google "Rafts, plinths and islands", you get a reply that points to the different types of land and structures found in the survival game 'Raft'. However I'm thinking about how we present artwork and how we sometimes try to isolate the work from the world, so that we can contemplate it.

Rafts, plinths and islands are three dimensional ways of thinking about framing. They are also usually associated with sculpture rather than drawing, however there is a fair amount of territory that overlaps and I have in the past looked at drawing as very thin sculpture, a reminder that all physical things, no matter how flat are all three dimensional.

I can remember first coming across Anthony Caro's work in the late 1960s and one of the things that was fascinating about it, was that it didn't need to stand on a plinth.

Anthony Caro, Prairie: 1967

By eliminating the plinth the work became part of the world you were in, it occupied the same space as you did. This was such a different feeling to encountering sculpture on a plinth. It felt at the time liberating and democratic, to bring sculpture down from off its aristocratic pedestal.

Rodin: Hand of God: 1998

Sculpture presented on a plinth, such as 'The Hand of God' by Rodin, is presented to us as if it belongs to another place, in effect it occupies an island that you have to get to in order to appreciate it. The island plinth is rather like another country, the game 'Raft' taps into the psychic feeling tone we have when we encounter islands as places of intrigue, mystery and/or danger; islands hold within themselves secrets that can only be discovered by exploration and getting there is sometimes a struggle. The plinth standing isolated in a gallery space, operates in a similar way to an island, the work that stands upon it may be new and uncharted, but we know someone has presented this work to us as something worth contemplation.

The aesthetic 'struggle' to understand what art means is often encountered in galleries, especially if the work on display is of classical provenance. The 'special' nature or 'aura' of the work is signified by the plinth, you immediately know it is of cultural and monetary worth by the fact that it has been three dimensionally 'framed' and presented.

From the Dauphin website

Companies such as Dauphin operate as art display consultants and if you are thinking about how to present work, it is always worth looking at what they do, if only to steal ideas. If you go to their website you will find that they operate as a service that adds value to the work they present. Compare what they do to shop window displays, where expensive items are spotlit and are given small pedestals to isolate them from other objects or set into felt or silk. For art display consultants the art object is no different to any other culturally valuable item, the job is to heighten the allure of the object and at times to give it an almost religious significance.

Jewellery shop display

St Mark's Basilica treasury

Spotlit and behind glass, the religious treasures of St Mark's in Venice, are presented as objects for veneration. The sculpture as presented by Dauphin it is suggested ought to have a similar level of veneration. However the relics in St Marks are set into a vitrine, a way of presenting things that is closely related to plinths and pedestals but more concerned with religious value than monetary value. I shall preserve the issues related to vitrines for another post, as they not only signify religious value, but the idea of the museum gaze and the sanctity of research.

The plinth is a modern version of the pedestal. The pedestal is a sort of shorthand version of the column and it signifies Classicism, which was and still is, an aesthetic attitude that suggests the primacy of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

A classical pedestal.

If you place modern sculpture on a classical pedestal or niche, as I have done with one of my ceramics, or in the work of Lee Bul further below, it is framed or separated out from life, as well as curiously, unframed, the incongruity making the observers very aware that they are meant to see that a point is being made.

Ceramic votive fetish presented on a classical pedestal

Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo 2024

Of course you can simply place your work on a domestic object such as a chair.

Contemporary artists are very aware of these issues, but perhaps the first modern artist to play with the idea of the plinth was Brancusi.

Brancusi display currently at the Pompidou centre

Brancusi shapes his plinths into forms that chime with the sculpture placed upon them.

Dogon: Kambari style

Certain sculptures made in the area of Africa that we call Mali by the Dogon people are given the attribute, 'Kambari' style. Made at exactly the same time as Brancusi made Portrait de Mme L.R, and for many years before he began carving, these sculptures also integrated their bases into their body forms. They remind us that the carvings are made from tree trunks, the base often being both something that is a 'ground' for the figure to stand on and a formal device that echoes the shape and form of the material that the figure was carved from. Brancusi used to celebrate his 'primitive' approach, often by incorporating elements from Romanian folk art and African sculpture into his work, which he saw as a source of more authentic artistic feeling.

Brancusi: Portrait de Mme L.R. 1914–17

Brancusi's 'Portrait de Mme L.R.', is like the Dogon sculpture shaped out of wood, the supporting base, or plinth, is an integral component of the sculpture, you can't take the top part off and put it on another base. If Brancusi had been a painter, it would be as if he had begun painting onto the frame of his painting. Something that we see happening in the work of Howard Hodgkin, 60 years later.

Howard Hodgkin:Blue Movie: 1986/7

Picasso of course got there first. He realised you could use the frame to play a perceptual game.

Picasso: Still life with chair caning and rope frame. 1912

Picasso asks us questions as to how we see and what we see. The chair caning is a print, a slice of existing life, but non the less an illusion. The letters are real letters, the fractured viewpoints of the painted still life are reminders of the various positions taken by the artist as he looked at the still life and the rope frame asks us to think about the caning again, as its twisted material is of the same material family. But it also asks the question, "`Where does the image stop?" Does it stop inside the frame, or is the rope part of the experience? This conundrum is opened out in some of my earlier posts in particular in relation to the parergon.

We have now returned to the wall space and framing a flat image, hopefully it now makes sense as to why I'm looking at the plinth within a blog focused on issues related to drawing.

There is a sort of halfway house for sculpture and that is the raft, something that in the case of a flat image is not that dissimilar to the shelf.

Sébastien de Ga: Aluminium Sculpture on Pallet 1, 2017

The wooden pallet is often used as a type of raft when presenting work. It is high enough to separate the work out from the floor, but low enough to suggest that the work still bears some sort of floor relationship. Pallets also have a sense of a working life or everyday reality associated with them. They are made for easy manoeuvrability and suggest therefore impermanence.

The raft can also be a small island, in the case of Hans Op de Beeck's still lives, he 'frames' the work by installing it on a low platform. That halfway house between a full blown plinth and the raft is as I pointed out similar to the relationship between the frame and the shelf, another presentation technique de Beeck uses.

Hans Op de Beeck

Standing frames on a shelf or ledge

Standing a frame on a ledge reintroduces the physical presence of the frame. It is another of those contradictions that we sometimes encounter when displaying work. On the one hand we want to cut the work out of an everyday space to suggest that it is something different and that you ought to spend time focusing on the ideas that the work is holding. On the other hand we may want to suggest that the work is available or 'domesticated' is some way. There was some work presented in the last Venice Biennale on old chests of drawers. The sculptures therefore feeling more like ornaments.

Objects sitting on top of a contemporary chest of drawers

Michael Samuels

Michael Samuels has made sculpture from furniture, therefore the plinth is an integral part of the sculpture, table legs still operating as table legs, even though the table is no longer a table.

The image above could be a plan view of a gallery floor with island positions marked for sculptures or an elevation view of a gallery wall with flat works displayed as isolated images. On a flat wall the space between images set out like this can feel vast. The difference being that in plan view you are actually in the room space, standing on the floor, therefore you are also activating the room space as an additional three dimensional object, this is not the case on the wall. On the wall you can cluster a group of works together rather like islands and then put one larger work some distance away, suggesting a larger land mass off in the distance. The viewer it is suggested needs to travel between these images, just as you would when sailing at sea. However you travel in the mind, your eyes do the work, as you stand on the outside of the situation.

So yet another series of things to think about when displaying work. There are always more issues and the next subject related to presentation methods I shall deal with is that of the display case and how that effects and affects the meanings associated with art work. I'll leave that for another post.