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Intersecting Language and Sculpture (Language, Material, Space)
I’ve always found that phrase, and similar phrases, fascinating. I really like that the drawing doesn’t only illustrate the phrase, but seems to do something with it. The elephant fully there in one image, then only partly visible/leaving in another, and somehow the room feels changed by both—by its presence and its almost-absence (presence-absence-trace?). I also really like “notes on language and taking up space” next to the drawings—it makes me think about how something social or hard to name can become almost material, or leave a trace even when it isn’t fully visible but not simply invisible either. And maybe why some things are easier to approach obliquely, through phrases, images, or other metaphors, rather than directly.’ Mercedes in her email to me
I am interested in the way that language can be used to embody rather than illustrate sculptural experiences, experiences which involve coming to terms with being a body, an object that interacts with and interferes with the physical world.
Why do turns of phrase, metaphors, and idioms such as ‘There’s an elephant in the room’ so often require an image of space or movement within space to understand a social condition, in this example that there is something very obvious that no one is talking about?
I first came across this idea through Phyllida Barlow’s interviews, where she discusses her approach to sculpture. She writes in one:
‘I’m interested in height. Well actually I’m not interested in height, I’m interested in the adventure of going up there. But, yes it is about that word called ‘height’, but it’s more about the adventure of what happens about reaching up there. It’s much more to do with the physical sensation of reaching somewhere, like being in a magnificent cathedral and looking up and your body is somehow taken into an imaginary adventure of going up into that vaulted ceiling. That’s what I’m interested in, it’s not just height for height’s sake, which is what these reductive texts imply, that I’ve got to use height because height is a kind of subject of the work, and it isn’t. It’s something about how we ourselves use space, because we’re an average height ourselves and nearly everything is made to accommodate that, and what happens if one goes beyond that. Like how we look at nature, it can so often be out of our reach. I mean seeing a tree from a distance is very different from pressing your face against the tree itself, where you lose the image and you are then having a completely different physical engagement with that object. It’s no longer a tree-image at all, it’s something else, and that transformation I think is incredible. It’s like the notion of standing on the mountain and you don’t see the mountain. There is actually a wonderful book by Nan Shephard called The Living Mountain, it’s her description of living in the Cairngorms. It’s absolutely stunning because the whole time she is doing this close reading of the environment she lives in, down to the minutest detail, the insects on the heather.[1] But she describes walking on the mountains and suddenly becoming very aware of the inside of the mountain, the bit you can’t see, that most of the time you’re experiencing the external surfaces. And yet beneath that there’s this unknown world.’
I have found so far that the idea crops up more in fiction, poetry, and prose than in academic texts, so much of my research may come from these sources. I have been finding much more value in fiction than in fact recently; for this reason, I aim for this research to culminate creatively.
Having discussed the topic with my tutor and friend, she has suggested the following resources:
- Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Michel Foucault
- Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector
"Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror. Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water”
- When I Sing Mountains Dance, Irene Sola
- The Poetics of Space, Bachelard
- Metaphors we live by, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
- Happy Objects, Sara Ahmed
- Dreaming by the Book, Scarry
Peine del Viento (Comb of the Wind) , Eduardo Chillida, Donostia
It is obvious how language and images connect, how images tell stories and how words tell stories. But sculptures and objects don’t seem to tell stories in the same way that words do, they tell stories of course but through wear and tear and journeying, moving through space.
‘‘Zeus’s practice spans across installation, text, social engagement, and performance, approaching each medium as a way to test and unsettle existing structures.
Her practice focuses on the illusion of stability and the costs involved in sustaining it. Her work begins with observations of how things are organised, maintained, and perceived, seeking to reveal the tensions and risks embedded within everyday structures.
Through the reconfiguration and transformation of found objects, symbols, and materials, often displaced from their original functions and contexts, she examines the mechanisms that underpin what is commonly understood as stable, natural, or secure.
Her practice explores how such conditions become normalised over time, and how violence can operate in subtle ways, constituting the continual functioning of social structures.’
Foucault on Magrittes’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe
What is my problem with surrealism? I don't like work that deals with dreams particularly, I've always thought it a bit lazy. I like how it plays with space turning upside down
Battle of the Argonne Vaporous and Solid
'to catch objects in the snare of a double graphic form'
This is primarily about word and image. However he constantly uses sculptural language to understand these things. A mole-hill about to collapse is sculptural rather than image based. .
"The titles are chosen in order to keep others from pictures in a familiar region which the automatism of thought wo invoke in order to avoid anxiety. "
" And yet in this broken and drifting space, strange relations are formed, intrusions occur, sudden destruc- tive invasions, the fall of images among words, verbal explosions which crack the drawings and smash them to pieces"