Articles

Embodying Transformation continued

Christie Brown

The word ‘archaeology’ comes from the Greek arkhaiologica, meaning ‘discourse about ancient things’, and in first-century Greece archaeologists were actually a category of actors who re-created ancient legends on stage through dramatic mimes. Today archaeology is about studying human past through material traces of it that have survived, though only a tiny fraction of these traces exist and only a minute proportion of them are correctly identified or interpreted. As many archaeologists will confirm, they really only uncover the tip of the iceberg.

But its popularity and fascination is historic and enduring. During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries this interest was the domain of antiquarians and natural historians who collected large numbers of objects, both natural and man made, and placed them in settings of display referred to as Wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities. The Wunderkammer offered a microcosm of the world within a defined space. It had a creative quality, presenting diverse objects which inspired wonder and stimulated creative thought in what James Putnam has described as a ‘quest to explore the rational and the irrational’.¹ A Wunderkammer, he writes, was ‘a very private and devotional space specially created with the profound belief that nature was linked with art’. These rooms pre-empted our contemporary museums, and the treasure hunters can be seen as the forerunners of modern archaeologists.

But despite our need to fill the gaps in history, what we invariably get is an incomplete picture, an episode, a glimpse – and it is this fragmentary nature of the narrative that I find so fascinating. Despite a need to find solutions it’s the half-known story that is ultimately more intellectually stimulating and challenging.

My interest in this incomplete narrative connects directly to psychoanalysis. In Archaeology and Modernity Julian Thomas describes how the historical emergence of archaeology was connected with the development of the structural thought of late modernity, whilst providing a metaphor through which that thought could articulate itself. This was particularly evident in the case of Sigmund Freud. Freud was an avid collector of antiquities and compared his practice to that of an archaeologist, clearing away debris to reveal the hidden treasures of the past. Thomas writes:

it is clear that Freud took his own metaphor quite seriously and believed the unconscious to be literally stratified, the deeper layers of the psychic apparatus relating both to the early experiences of the person and the prehistoric experiences of the human race.²

Thomas points out that archaeology evokes ‘notions of the repressed, the lost and the forgotten and of the drama of discovery which are often spatialised in terms of the relationship between depth and surface’. He suggests that this dichotomy developed out of a post-Reformation concern for human interiority and other separations, such as above and below, inside and outside, which contributed to modern thought. Archaeology, Thomas argues,

has found itself with the burden of being a source of many of the metaphors through which the modern imagination has sought to understand the world. For our culture it is firmly connected with a movement from the present to the past, from superficiality to profundity, from individual to the mythic, from the known to the mysterious.

He considers this to be counterproductive for archaeologists, who seek to demonstrate that the ‘remains of the past are all around us’, but it goes some way to explaining the contemporary fascination for the discipline.

Writing in 1995 for the Tate Gallery’s end of millenium exhibition, ‘Rites of Passage’, curator Stuart Morgan³ quotes the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who proposed that important rites of passage in society are defined by three stages. The first is one of separation from normal daily life, the second is being on a limen or a threshold in a transitional space, and finally the third stage is reintegration into society at a different level. The liminal stage is a vital part of a ritual journey that results in transformation.

In the use of the mould – a positive object containing negative space that can be read as symbolic of the liminal stage – and the technique of casting and press moulding to produce repeated objects, my clay practice embodies transformation, and my most recent series is developing under the broad title Between the Dog and the Wolf, which refers to this transitional threshold and is a translation of the French phrase for twilight when the safety of daylight gives way to the unknown forces of the night.

In a work in progress group, Entre Chien et Loup (fig. 14), (fig. 15), a metamorphoses or transformation begins to be played out as the female figures manifest change through stance and the sprouting growth of animal features. These are the first five of several, cast from the same mould, and my intention is to develop a crowd or a herd as the human takes on the attributes of the animal as a way of relating to the world at large and as a metaphor for growth and change.

In making this work I am exploring the boundary between our rational and instinctive selves as well as an interest in zoomorphic representation. Alun Graves writes about this piece: ‘the suggestion that dark forces are at work is evident yet there is also a playfulness in the group, something magical and dreamlike’,⁴ and the work is clearly influenced by my recent studies at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology of a culture in which the animal world played a hugely significant role.

Drawing on the practices of taxonomy and conservation that accompanies museum culture, the vitrine, for example, can magically transform the most humble or mundane object into something special, unique, and attractive. The objects are preserved and contained, set aside, frozen in time, and we the viewers are voyeurs, unable to touch or engage with them except at one remove. In my work The Problem of Communication (fig. 16), (fig. 17) I am using the vitrine to comment on my observation of human relationships at both a personal and universal level. Here the frustrations of communication that often seem to be deliberately acted out between us are expressed and emphasized as poignant misunderstanding. The ceramic heads come from four moulds that refer to our basic similarities and essential differences but all vary in expression and finish, emphasizing the sameness and difference within humanity. The vitrine encases and protects them. It separates them from the viewer but the eye-level display allows an attempt at engagement.

Another recent work, Ex Votos (fig. 18), (fig. 19), from the series Between the Dog and the Wolf, resembles an archaeological dig or a burial site. Shards, those pottery fragments that provide archaeologists with scraps of information about the past, fill up the male and female heads with information, history, and memories. These shards come from previous artworks of my own that have been rejected or damaged. The broken fragment of fired clay was once part of a whole form that has been lost, yet the fired fragment remains indestructible and permanent. Each head is documented with a number in reference to museum classification systems, and some numbers are prefixed by dollar and yen signs to demonstrate their timeless, priceless status.

Referring to both the embodied gift as a way of finding redemption and to the recent discipline of archaeology that developed from the practice of natural historians and antiquarians, the wall relief entitled Insignificance (fig. 20) developed from a significant work at Wapping, The Transformers. In Insignificance the bodies are laid out like a map or a dig, reflecting the power and indifference of the natural landscape. The formal relationship refers to the fifteenth-century transi-tombs in which an ornamental representation of the aristocratic deceased is echoed by the cadaver below, reminding the viewer of physical mortality, to which even kings and princesses must succumb.

At the same time the hanging body parts make reference both to the practice of ex-votos and to ancient fragments as a source of knowledge, and this mix of nature and learning offers hope. In her review about the work in progress exhibition of this work, Babette Martini writes that my figures

become more like ‘essays’ on a particular experience, they no longer only look incomplete but they are incomplete or unfinished in the same sense that man keeps developing, even over centuries, adjusting mind and body to new environments and challenges. Thus the fragmented figure becomes a sign for healing and in a sense the disjointed body regains completeness, the limbs become re-attached.⁵

I am fundamentally a maker of things first and a theorist second. Making objects requires skill and time, and so I do not deeply engage with the demanding level of theoretical discourse that informs many areas of art practice. Perhaps I can compare myself with Baudelaire’s flaneur. I wander through the world of theory and pick up scraps which may be useful to me as a way of extending and developing my practice.

Through archaeology I am exploring a connection with aspects of ceramic history and imbuing my practice with a level of meaning through psychoanalysis. My interest in the archaic objects that were used in rites of passage connects to contemporary ideas of transformation and individuation through psychoanalytic process.

Because my work is both formed and informed by the ability of the mould to receive an imprint and the interface between negative mould and positive artefact can be seen as a symbol of liminal space, and because I use historic artefacts that are embodiments of ancient social rites as references, I am suggesting that the objects I create can be seen as embodiments of transition and transformation.

It also seems appropriate that I work in a medium that is not only a transformative material involving the process of firing but also one that occupies a transitional position within contemporary visual culture.

Top of the page | Download Word document | Next

Notes

1. James Putnam, Art and Artefact : the Museum as Medium, London, Thames and Hudson, 2001. back to text
2. Julian Thomas, Archaeology and Modernity, London and New York, Routledge, 2004. back to text
3. Stuart Morgan, Rites of Passage, London, Tate Gallery, 1995. back to text
4. Alun Graves, Exhibition review, Ceramic Review, May/June 2005. back to text
5. Babette Martini, ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’, Interpreting Ceramics, no.5, 2004. back to text