Walking along the street ‘things’ catch my attention.
A crack in an old wall with a hardly visible, small, dry, weedy plant growing out of the crevice, or a tiny square card lying on the street downtown, covered in dust with a monkey drawn on it, or it could be the way the sunlight is illuminating a large fallen branch, suspended, caught by a vine and the wind is moving it slightly so that it seems to be calling me over.
I notice these things and I may pick them up, or simply make a mental note to later write in my journal not really knowing what they are for. There is an intuitive process at work, I don’t just pick up everything, partly because my apartment is not big enough but when I do pick up a bunch of things as I am walking along, before I get home I have often put alot of them down again and what remains seem to be coming with me for some undetermined reason.
Rhizomatic connections
As part of my sculpture class we discuss transcendental philosophy. In particlar the works of French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. One of his works with another philosopher Félix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, (link to an overview here) they use the rhizome, as a model for understanding complex, interconnected, and non-hierarchical systems.
The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots…
… In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system.
While a rhizome in simple biological terms is an underground plant stem that consists of nodes which at any point can be the start of a new plant.
Deleuze and Guattari talk about a rhizome as having no beginning or end and can connect diverse elements, things, ideas, and even forces.
From this way of thinking concepts can connect with anything really and can stop or begin again at a new point at anytime. There is no need to only create from a linear ‘tree root system’ which has a more progressive path.
Reading some of these philosophical works is definitely not easy to understand but it has the wonderful effect of taking me out of myself and stretching my mind to consider other approaches.
Forwards, backwards, sideways, deepening, expanding, moving in random directions, assembling objects, subjects, memories and elements.
I find myself becoming more aware of my non-linear process, and in this rhizomatic way even what seems inconsequential is potentially part of the solution for ‘the work’.
Noticing small details can take us elsewhere
Recently I created a sculpture in my studio at home. As part of my studies our professor had suggested a loose brief of using 5 elements to create a work. I had a few ideas floating around in my head for a couple of weeks but nothing specific, rather I had thoughts of the feeling I wanted to express but with what I wasn’t sure.
So I actively started to look around and pay attention to the details. Walking in the street looking for objects, material references or ideas even when talking to people about other subjects. (One never knows when some significant information may come in.)
Then I woke up one morning and decided to start the sculpture. I placed a granite rock on the ground and started moulding some tin mesh as I already had an idea of how I wanted it to float around the rock.
I also wanted to have something inside the mesh but with no idea what that could be until I saw a small, dried thorny plant on my shelf that I had collected on my trip to Portugal last year. It reminded me of all the fragile and interesting weeds I had seen that grow in all sorts of extremely difficult places.
I placed the thorny plant on the rock, and then the electrical wire and string arrangements quickly found their way into the collective, yet something seemed a little underwhelming, until suddenly the angle of the sun coming into the room moved.
The sunlight was at the right angle to hit the sculpture and the strong contrasts of light and shadow brought the work to life. It was in that brief moment, when I saw this detail, that I grabbed my camera and started to capture the work.
Combining unrelated elements into a meaningful collective form, allows a new sensibility and articulation to emerge.
When things come together
Sculpture 50 W X 30 H X 27 D
Objects found on the street in Rio, on the coastal cliffs in Portugal,
in the garage of my neighbour.
A series of unrelated elements
and thoughts
that are picked up, noted
perhaps later to be connected
becoming something, new
together
Collections of things:
- objects, materials, elements
- thoughts, concepts, ideas
- memories, visions, dreams
- words, symbols, numbers
- images, drawings, scribbles
- colours, textures, patterns
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