What's going on?

Ali Cherri, Totems (2022), at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, Venice (23 April–27 November 2022). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Roberto Marossi.

I remember several years ago being drawn to Ali Cherri's work 'The Gatekeepers' which drew on the tradition of erecting totem poles at the gates of certain communities, as a welcoming or a warning. Cherri was making hybrid forms that at first sight I was was confused as to whether this was a contemporary art practice or that of someone from an indigenous part of some country I had yet to encounter. He was tapping into a feeling that I thought I could sense, one that suggested that artists were trying to tap back into ways of working that built direct relationships between us and the world we inhabit. Artwork as portals into the world of the spirit. 

Ali Cherri: The Gatekeepers

Invoking figures inspired by the animal kingdom, The Gatekeepers, presented at the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Marseille, paid homage to the souls of all the naturalised animals housed in Marseille's Museum of Natural History, located just a few steps away. Ali Cherri collected curiosities, bought at auction or from antique dealers, from Marseille and elsewhere. Then he sought to restore to them a presence, by working with these found objects to make them 'strange' again, to give them back a magical presence. I'd also seen his work at the Venice Biennale in 2022 and I was interested in what he was doing, as at one time I'd decided it would be wonderful if every house had a warning object made for it by an artist, a sort of protecting spirit that would ward off intruders and protect those inside and I had made some trial pieces to fit on poles that could stand in someone's garden. But perhaps people also needed a welcoming form, one I then realised was already in place, something we call a Christmas wreath.

Christmas wreath.

I was also thinking at the time about Halloween and it is coming round again, so I must have a good look around at what people are doing. Someone down the road has had a large spider put up over their doorway. Every year when the girls were small, it was my job to cut out the face of the pumpkin lantern.

Halloween decorations

It's as if we have a need to at least once a year to just go and celebrate the uncanny, and recognise the fact that there might be other forces at work. Perhaps we all need a touch of magic. 

Back in 2022 during the time the Venice Biennale entitled 'The Milk of Dreams' was held, J. J. Charlesworth, one of the editors of ArtReview, wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Magic in Art'.

In the article he stated; 

 'If ideas of reason, rational action, science and progress are in decline, and if the human culture and consciousness formed by those ideas is dangerous and destructive, then the only alternative can be a return to the premodern: or rather not a return, but a dissolution of modernity and modern ways of thinking in the present. This is the cultural driver for the revival of the sacred and the mystical in art. Magic replaces science, belief replaces knowledge, ritual replaces rational action. Circular time replaces history. And as a corollary, the idea of the distinctly human subject, a being different in thought and action to the rest of nature, is dismissed as the hubris of the colonist and oppressor. While much ecological thinking grounds itself in science, it leads back to what is really the premodern mystical view of humans as participants intertwined with nonhuman entities as part of a greater, harmonious ecosphere. Much of the new mysticism in art regularly invokes the old countercultural tropes of psychedelic transcendence and the loss of the individual self to the collective and a greater planetary entity' He then ended the article with... 'but this time it’s in VR.'

I thought it a prescient article and I agreed with quite a lot of what he was saying except for the ending, whereby he decided that it was now VR that was going to carry the can, so to speak. Perhaps it's my age but I find VR very problematic, not least its ability to eat up resources as more and more data farms are built to serve the ever expanding needs of new technology. We have been here before, in the time of the First World War, the rise of Dada was a response to where science and so called modern civilisation had led us. The deaths of millions in the trenches was a lesson in hubris and artists were not slow to pick up on the fact that science had helped human beings develop more and more deadly weapons, whilst human nature was still in effect 'tribal' and using an operating system developed during a time when the most damage someone could inflict on other humans was by using a thrown rock. 

Leonora Carrington 

The title of the biennale,'The Milk of Dreams' was taken from one of Leonora Carrington's children's books. There had been an effort to readdress the gender balance in terms of historical representations at biennales and she was used as a sort of touchstone, in terms of sensibility. She viewed the artistic process itself as an alchemical act of transmutation, turning everyday materials and subconscious visions into sacred visual realities. She populated her works with magical beasts, giant goddesses, and human-animal hybrids and she was deeply versed in the Kabbalah, Mayan cosmology, and the Tarot. In particular, she reclaimed domestic spaces—like kitchens and cauldrons—as sites of ancient feminine power, healing, and sorcery rather than confinement, there was something about her that reminded me of my grandmother.

One of my blog posts on the 2022 Biennale was the first report on a Venice Biennale whereby I had felt confident enough to put a couple of images in of my own work, simply because I could see that the underlying theme was a pretty good fit of where I was at that time and in many ways still am. The difference is that over the last few years I have become more convinced that the world is again in danger of letting loose science led technologies that we have no idea of how harmful they may be. Because we are still in effect creatures of the Palaeolithic world, I believe we need to in some way return to ways of meaning making that link us all back into the world out of which we emerged. I don't mean by this we need to turn to formalised religions, but that some sort of spiritual need needs to be fed, if not we become mentally disturbed. Some people are already returning to 'nationalism', finding it feeds spiritual needs by providing individuals with a sense of meaning, filling the emotional and existential voids that we need to experience. It gives individuals a higher cause to live and potentially die for, transcending the mundane routines of daily life and it establishes a clear framework of right and wrong based on the loyalty to and preservation of the nation. The problem with this is it also leads very easily to posturing and aggression, which in turn lead to war and war is what brought out all the new weapons of destruction that we saw emerge during World War One. AI led drone technology is only the tip of an iceberg that would be brought into view if a new world war was ever started.

So why magic? Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic states that both truth and falsehood, as well as illusion may be used to effect change, you just have to see what works. He suggests that it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that actions produce tangible results, even though they might not be considered logical. Which is somewhat of a relief and when looking at the diagram (above) he produced to show how the four different modes of thinking were related, it is easy to see how art is firmly set within the quarter bounded by intuition and feeling, a place where I would expect imagination to be comfortably housed. Imagination is one of art's most powerful tools, it's use adds meaning to our lives by taking us out of ourselves and giving us new possibilities. Similar to art, magic uses imagination to create meaning and it is inseparable in its methodology from play. Dukes essentially strips magic of its mumbo jumbo and arcane symbology and gives it a sense of post-modern purpose, some of which I believe the arts can appropriate too.  

But how? There is an ancient Sumerian epic poem dating back to around 2100 BCE called the Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The poem contains a passage known to historians as "The Nam-shub of Enki." In this text, it is described that long ago, all of humanity spoke the exact same language and praised the god Enlil in unison. The god Enki, lord of wisdom, who was incidentally the deity related to crafts, but also subterranean waters, magic, and incantations, in his trickster mode, decided to change the speech in their mouths and "put contention into it," effectively fracturing humanity's single tongue into diverse languages. (An early Babel myth). In the text of the myth, the word nam-shub (nam-šub) translates to "incantation," "sung spell," or "magical speech. This nam-shub is a powerful idea, and was quoted within a novel by the writer Neal Stephenson, who uses text from the Sumerian epic and quotes it directly in his novel Snow Crash. Stephenson interprets this "incantation that fractures language" as the ultimate neurological anti-virus; a piece of code designed in the novel to shatter a universal mental interface, that had been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and bodies. In this case the nam-shub is used to ensure that humans would still have free will. I. e. Stephenson uses the old idea of magical speech, cloaked in the technological language of a modern world computer virus. In my case 'magical speech' is something I associate with the making of fetishes. It being the associated narrative that empowers the fetish. For instance, my reading of the function of the Mali Boli fetish is to accumulate and control the naturally occurring life force called nyama for the spiritual benefit of the community. 

Mali Boli fetish

These fetishes are complex creations created from esoteric recipes, or 'daliluw'. Animal bones, vegetable matter, honey, and metal are packed around an interior armature of bamboo wrapped in white cotton cloth, which are then covered with layers of mud and clay. Over time their surfaces accumulate related sacrificial materials, including chicken and goat blood, chewed kola nuts, alcohol, and millet porridge. Each added layer of material adds to the power narrative and as it does it lends the structure greater spiritual power. The disparate elements of which boliw (the plural of boli) are composed symbolise the various parts of the universe, so that the whole object can be read as a model of local cosmological belief. It has also been noted that a boli's sacrificial coatings are strikingly similar to the undigested contents of human stomachs, while its interior is made of materials generally associated with the body's exterior surrounding world. For this reason, they have sometimes been interpreted as portrayals of animals and people turned inside out, a sort of 4D transformation, as in H G Wells's 'The Plattner Story', whereby a schoolmaster disappears after a chemical explosion and returns nine days later with his body entirely inverted; literally turned inside out, as in a mirror image. In this case my own visualisation being a more gory one, my anatomic inversion would put the body's organs on the outside. Wells was illustrating a spatial fourth-dimensional rotation, a concept heavily inspired by the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, his Möbius strip being the 2 dimensional cousin of the Klein Bottle, a form that I have thought of as one the human body could easily be seen as being. All of which is my roundabout way of fusing scientific ideas with magical thinking. Contemporary superposition theory within quantum mechanics being my particular go to when trying to tap into possible science/magic conjunctions. As Ramsey Dukes suggests, it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that you just have to explore where and when actions may produce tangible results. In this case I'm tempted to see 'belief' as being a prime mover, especially as I have seen the placebo effect at work, alongside a continuing use of charm bracelets and contemporary votive practices. But perhaps even more than these, is the fact that contemporary politics seems to be locked into what I can only think of as the use of 'nam-shub' incantations, such as 'stop the boats' or 'fake news', short phrases that seem to magically shape reality. 

The Promise of arrival: 2016

'The Promise of Arrival', a work of mine from 2016, is a woven textile, an artefact that you can wrap around you to keep yourself warm, it is also when hung from a wall an image of a boat, one filled with migrants, attempting to cross a sea. The depiction of the sea echoing the shapes made by the textile when it begins to fold, a textile sea swell, another 'folding' by analogy, another gambit in a set of artworks that seek to unravel a plot to eliminate refugees and rename them terrorists. This is another 'nam-shub', one used to ensure that humans still have free will, this time as an antidote to the 'stop the boats' incantation, a spell that has been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and therefore bodies too. 

See also: 

Magic

Hybridity and permeability 

Chaos Magic

Why I'm making animist images

Wearable objects and curative things

Thinkfeel

Chaos magic

For many years I have made fetishes. physical objects made to be inhabited or empowered by a spiritual force capable of offering protection or healing. These objects sit in my practice alongside votives and I view them both as objects of magical power. They operate using what I think of as sympathetic magic; a type of magical thinking based on the belief that an object or action can affect a person or thing through resemblance or a symbolic connection given to something via an associated narrative. 

For instance sometimes I make fetishes in the form of body parts.However they are also like animals, in this way a body part can have more agency and it feels as if it can take independent action.

Ceramic body part fetishes

At other times fetishes take the form of an animal. They are given an energy associated with the way the receiver of the fetish thinks about the animal depicted. A dog may be hard working, fierce, loyal or just dogged. A monkey might be mischievous, thoughtless or just swinging in the trees, the important issue being that the nature of the fetish will depend on what belief the participant has about the animal.  

Ceramic animal fetishes

I am fascinated by objects being able to affect invisible action at a distance. But just as interesting to me as sympathetic magic, is the contagious effect; contagious magic being the anthropological belief that things once in contact continue to act on each other, meaning a person or object can pass qualities, power, or harm to another through a physical association. My fetishes and votives working in this case as objects of touch. My handling of clay for instance is frozen as finger imprints into each object, which is why they are not smoothed out. I can put all of my feelings into my making and hope that those feelings can be passed on to others. 

Loneliness votive

I have made several loneliness votives. We all need a hug a one time or another and that is essentially what they consist of, a form hugging itself. They are small, designed to be kept in a pocket or held in the hand in times of stress. Their surfaces are of polished wax over rough fired clay, so that more handling enhances the effect. I put a lot of care into the final finish, so that whoever is given one, or asks for one, can intuitively feel that I'm passing on something that has had care put into it. The hug becomes a hug for them. It is passed on, both by its symbolic representation and by the 'care in the hand'. 

Occasionally as I'm working I get hints that what I'm sort of doing is reinventing a type of 'chaos magic' or 'magick' as it is often spelt within the realms of those who operate in this area. It was Grant Morrison whose graphic novels 'The Invisibles' I used to read avidly, that introduced me to chaos magick. This is a more modern approach to magic, one that acknowledges the old traditions, but which takes a more 'postmodern' approach to how to apply magical effects. It is more an attitude to practice than a set of rules or a belief system. Chaos magic explores the techniques of magical action, rather than setting up a particular sets of symbols to believe in, however many of the techniques used involve participants in engaging with belief systems. There being no absolute truth, therefore a magic practitioner can theoretically do anything in order to achieve a result. However at its core is a belief in belief, a similar reasoning also underlying why my votive objects can affect both physical and mental change. 

One definition of chaos is, 'The formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos.' The apparent order of things, a chaos magician might argue, is merely an arbitrary structure that we perceive. This formless state of matter, being a primal force from which is built magical energies. A chaos magician has the ability to change beliefs and thinking paradigms whenever a different approach is needed. I. e. they are accustomed to be able to look at and see their reality from different points of view. To the chaos magician, beliefs are choices, but belief is the tool that empowers the magic. I suppose it was this issue that drew me to exploring chaos magic as a system of thinking, as it allowed me to embrace a number of varying systems at the same time and to embed them all into my thought process. Hence my interest in outdated beliefs and para-scientific ideas such as Rayonism, Geometrical Psychology, etheric doubles, subtle bodies and similar ideas. 

At the centre of these belief systems is a concept of materialising thought, whether these thoughts are constructed as flat images or objects, what is interesting is that ideas that were in someone's head are now manifest as tangible things. Ceramic objects, because they are invested with clear memories of my hands at work, are often used by myself as fetishes and I have attempted many times to conjure up the associated energies that need to be embedded within fetish type objects. As you make them, you need to believe that you are investing them with some sort of energy or psychic force, something that is transmitted through the hand/eye/brain relationship and as you bring them into a public arena, you need to be able to communicate that concept to others. Which is why stories and narratives are often needed to bolster the visual affect of these objects. 

My fetish store

Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic produced a diagram to explain how magic sat alongside art, science and religion as a way of explaining or controlling human behaviour. 

I shall in a future post use Ramsey Duke's as a guide as to how magic can be thought of as a way to explain how an art practice can be also in some ways magic too and I have a bit more to say about how an artwork as fetish might operate. 

See also:

Magic

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Magic in art Slideshow

Benjamin Betts and Geometrical Psychology

Eye Music Includes link to 'Thought Forms' by Besant and Leadbeater

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The iconography of the invisible

The active cycle of breathing techniques A paper whereby I try to visualise the invisible sensations that pain and emotional trauma instil within us. A first step towards the construction of a form of ‘illusory enactment’.

Why I'm making Animist images

Apophenic Connections

Sir Isaac Newton's copy of a diagram of the 'philosopher's stone'

I live in a street called Newton Grove. The name Newton was used for several streets in my area of the city, because where we now live was at one time the New Town part of Leeds. The Old English words neowe (new) and tūn (farmstead, enclosure, or settlement), being the historical roots out of which the name emerged. Our house was built in the 1840s and we have seen maps of the area from that time that show that before then, the area was a rural settlement, fields occupying the space where our house was to be built. 

I am therefore primed to remember the name Newton as if it has some significance, as in Sir Issac Newton, a man who achieved the "first great unification", in which he brought together the understandings of the observable phenomena of gravity on Earth with the observable laws of behaviour of celestial bodies in space, formulating a fundamentally new, universal mathematical framework that it was thought applied to every particle in the universe. This was considered the foundational step in the quest for a unified theory of physics. This connection is in many ways an obvious one, as Sir Issac Newton is probably the most famous 'Newton' there is, but nevertheless the idea that someone set out on a quest to find a way to explain everything, is a powerful one and one that for myself has almost religious overtones. Newton was though also interested in what he understood as active principles in matter; which means that he did not view matter as as passive substance, using alchemy to investigate these "active principles"; the forces, spirits, or vital interactions within nature, that he thought might explain chemical changes. Therefore, metallic growth and change as a realisation of vital forces and his great moment of insight, gravitational attraction, were not in his mind of different realities, science and magic, were still bedfellows; science at this time, had not quite pulled itself away from old ideas of alchemy and spiritual forces.

This type of connected thinking, whereby you just let your mind pick up on whatever threads seem to become valid and for whatever reasons, is a psychological phenomenon which is known as apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns or relationships between completely unrelated things. It is also it seems to me the root of how magical thinking came into being, a belief that one's thoughts or actions can influence the course of events in the physical world, without any seemingly direct causal links. I'm both trying to show how apophenia works in my own case, especially as I write these blog posts and at the same time suggesting that perhaps there is some sort of magical something that emerges from the process of making these connections. Why might that be? I'm very aware that we are communal creatures and I have seen a lot of actions lately made by groups of people whereby I can't see any sense being made, except for the fact that people want to follow the implications of what others have said. This is the magic. We don't operate as creatures of reason, we operate as creatures of belief. This has long been understood by politicians especially and the art of rhetoric is a clear example of a system designed to shape people's actions by making them either believe what you are telling them or distrust what someone else is telling them. Rhetorical tropes alter the actual meaning of words. You can use metaphor to say that one thing is actually another, for example if you want to change the idea of a classroom from being an ordered centre within which learning takes place, you can simply say, "This classroom is a zoo". Notice how insistent the sentence is and how much easier it is to take on board. The classroom effectively becomes a zoo in your mind, an idea now completely eclipsing the more complicated idea that a classroom is a centre within which learning is taking place. If you use metonymy, you actually replace the name of an object with something else and that something else carries with it certain associations; for example if we look at the current U.S. President's administration, we might find that we begin to criticise it, but we can replace this complexity with a short term that covers a whole host of history and ideas and can call it 'the White House'. The White House' has decided that.... sounds far more neutral than so and so's administration has decided that...Sometimes we use synecdoche, whereby we use a part of something to represent the whole, such as there have been a lot of 'hungry mouths to feed'. Again this is a way of avoiding the actuality of the situation. There are starving people out there and they need food; that is the reality, but 'hungry mouths to feed' feels a little less urgent, less real. Perhaps the best example of how a rhetoric trope changes the way we think of words is irony. It can literally reverse a meaning, such as when we say "What a lovely day", when everything is going wrong. Another rhetoric trope is 'repetition', you state the same thing over and over again, until people begin to believe it. There is something called the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements are easier for your brain to understand and process than new information and your brain mistakes the feeling of ease and familiarity for actual truth, jumping from "I have heard this before" to "it must be correct". This is because in the real world of daily life, things you hear often (like your address or basic facts) are usually true, so your mind applies this rule to other statements even when they are false and it does have a pretty fast impact too, as believability increases after hearing a claim just two times.

Recently when reading Neil MacGregor's 'Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples', I came across another Newton, a John Newton, the man who wrote 'Amazing Grace' who was an English slave ship captain turned Anglican clergyman, who finally became a prominent anti-slavery abolitionist. Neil MacGregor was writing about the collective need we have to celebrate beliefs and in particular how prose can be activated for community engagement using rhyme and how when once rhyme is achieved, the associated rhythms lead naturally into communal song. In this case John Newton's poem, 'Amazing Grace' a poem with a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, was set to music several times, but did not get traction until it was eventually in 1835 put with a tune named "New Britain", to which it is most frequently sung today.

When I downloaded a copy of the song-sheet I then found out something else new, but something totally central to the themes that run through this blog, the fact that the song was set out using shape notes, so that people could read music easily. Another example of the use of a visual language to help people think through a proplem.

"Amazing Grace" became widely popular in 19th-century America largely through these shape-note hymnals and songbooks, which like William Walker's The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp, used a visual notation system, whereby note heads are drawn with specific geometric shapes (triangle, circle, square, diamond) corresponding to the solfège syllables (fa, sol, la, mi).

The shapes make it easy for untrained people to sight-read and sing harmonies together in community gatherings. As well as this being another example of 'eye music'. Shape-note singing (often called fasola singing) is meant for group participation rather than passive listening and it is in that group participation that belief is constructed, alongside collective action and comradeship.

All sorts of ideas can be activated for communal engagement using rhyme, not least magic spells. We have all heard at one time or another Shakespeare's classic lines from Macbeth,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Shakespeare that great shaper of the English language understood the power of words embedded into a rhythm. But contemporary media still uses the idea of rhyming spells to make them more effective; such as this rhyme from the TV show 'Charmed'.

I am light
I am one one too strong to fight
Go back to shadows where dark dwells
You cannot have this Halliwell
Now go away and leave my sight
And take away this endless night

I am light,
I am one too strong to fight.
So go away and leave my sight,
And take with you this endless night.

In order to make my votives more effective, I have also used short rhymes as a way of ritualising the transfer of the votive back into the hands of the person who initially wanted the votive.

And so we move from the name of the street where I live, via the invention of gravity, to singing hymns and witch's spells and end with my own attempts to help my votive images work by providing simple rhymes for basic ritual chanting. Connections are also the things out of which we weave stories. 

See also:

Eye music

The triangle

Memory drawing and hands

Wearable objects and curative things
The narrative tradition in drawing

Magic

Title slide of the Magic in Art lecture

I am not teaching any more, but when I was, one of the lectures I gave was on magic and art. I proposed that magic was at the core of the process we now call art and that the boundary between the real and the unreal is what is played with in both the performance of magic and art. As key examples I used images from ancient Egypt, Rome, India and Greece, and suggested that often there was no distinction between art and magic. 

What I wanted to do was to question the passivity of objects and to highlight how objects affect our experience of perception and effect change in our minds and bodies. Hopefully this way of thinking would lead to the construction of a different, more animist relationship with objects. 

A few slides from the presentation

When discussing theatrical props in relation to stage magic, Robinson argues that there is a process of transformation occurring as the trick is enacted; the ‘illusory enactment’ (Robinson, 2014, p. 136). I see this as being very similar to the need for rituals in the energising of the inanimate, and the making of magical reality. When I make votives for people, I also need to develop a private ritual for when the votive is 'put into operation' or made 'live'. This might seem to be illusionary but it is as 'real' an experience as any other. This is the driving force behind ritual objects. But they must all have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning. This is often called the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. In my own work this might be rather obtuse or hard to see, but I can track the connection, and this gives it, if only to myself, the object's spiritual energy.

For instance recent images that are like crabs, scorpions or insects, began with someone talking to me about a somatic experience of pain that felt like they were being stung on their insides. In my mind I saw the shape of this 'stinger', which was initially like a scorpion and drew an image for the person involved of a man riding a scorpion, like a horse; in effect getting on top of the pain, being in control of it. This became a print and as I thought about this 'creature' from the insides, it began to have offspring, other pain inflicting creatures, such as crabs that could pinch and snip you, or insects that could sting. We tend to believe that these sorts of creatures have no sentience, so in our minds they do not themselves feel pain, but this is probably myth too and they probably do feel pain. 

Getting on top of the pain

Visualising a somatic experience of pain that felt like being stung on the inside

By bringing humans and invertebrates together in a visual narrative, it gives honorific value to both and some sort of equality as agents, even if the scorpion was initially only an analogy in someone's mind. 

Eventually the drawings engendered solid ritualistic objects, as these seem to have more potency. Objects offer possibilities of actual 'exchange', they externalise ideas, and as they do they make them 'real'. In his paper, 'Becoming Real: The Fluidity of Objects in Magic', Fan-chen Huang explains how boundaries between the real and the imaginary become unpicked during the enactment of magic acts. He states, 'Since time immemorial, magic has been an art that, by manipulating human perception and simulating the real, alternates the passivity of objects and disturbs the stable relationship between man and things. As magic creates a real that surpasses the realm of common knowledge and becomes more real than the real, our recognition of objects undergoes a distortion.'  He goes on to state that '...objects seem to be able to deviate from their normal course of thing-for-us in magical illusions, shattering our affirmation of perception and the scientific absolute.' 

This unpicking of the 'scientific absolute' is a useful thought as far as I am concerned, as I'm always trying to find a place for my practice as an artist, and I sometimes need to work in those gaps between a logical, supposedly 'objective' view of the world and a scientific understanding of things. There still seems to myself something missing, whether this is 'spirit', the vital spark of life, Bergson's élan vital, invisible energy forces, that something or whatever it is that I can never quite touch or put my finger on, but which I intuitively feel is there. 

I was in the Ashmolean museum recently making drawings of objects that made sense to me in relation to where I am in my own work, and one vitrine related to work from an ancient Egyptian civilisation going back to the Palaeolithic period, was full of significant objects. It was as if they could still talk to me, especially as I was already making images of scorpions and the ones in the vitrine were used in magical rituals.

From sketchbook pages drawn in the Ashmolian Museum

On returning to Leeds I went back into image making and began looking for that form that was both magical and real. 

Drawing for ceramics

Of course I then had to do some research into ancient Egyptian culture and realised once again how powerfully these themes had already been dealt with, but instead of being put off, I am even more fascinated by the possibilities this approach to image making offers. 

Serket

Serket, “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”

In ancient Egypt images, like the one above that was used as part of a spell to protect you from stepping on a scorpion, were used to put into effect sympathetic magic. Scorpions were also often pictured without stings or claws or they had knives stuck in them, to magically render then harmless. The protective scorpion goddess Selket used to guard coffins of the dead, and in order to effect this, statuettes of scorpions were often pierced, so that they could be be mounted on poles that had been pushed into the ground. As I read about this I was reminded of the work I made for the Patching Sculpture trail in Nottingham, where I had done something similar, this time using flower forms as a memorial to those drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they tried to get to safety in Europe.

From the YSG Patching exhibition: Breaking Ground

The objects I'm thinking about are only just emerging, several are waiting to be fired, others waiting to be glazed and I've as yet to come up with the right way to position them on poles and how to do this both indoors and outdoors, but I shall get there.

In the meantime I have a couple already made.

Crab/scorpions

Magic fetishes emerging

References:

Robinson, A. (2014). All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation. In M. Schweitzer & J. Zerdy (Eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (pp. 135–148). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lynne U. Sneddon (2015) Pain in aquatic animals Journal of Experimental Biology Volume 218 Issue 7 April p. 967–976.

See also:

The evolution of an idea A post that shows in more detail how I evolve a sculptural idea 

The iconography of the invisible 

Drawing feet

Why I'm making animist images

Magic Slideshow