Week 7 - presentation, thoughts and readings on materiality

I presented my photographic works in the installation space in the sculpture area after having them printed A3 size. It was helpful to receive constructive feedback and advice where to take the exploration next. And a good time to clarify my journey so far ....

At the first workshop I brought in a wide variety of materials ranging from organic natural forms to synthetic objects. One such thing caught my eye - some thick plastic that we d received some furniture for the home wrapped in. Here was my first link back to the domestic space. At first I explored the material qualities of the plastic : photographed it and made some pretty bad videos of it examining in particular its relationship and the aesthetic caused when it interacted with light.

I became interested in cobwebs when I attended the Sydney Biennale and once again photographed them on my small canon camera and phone and made some more rather poor videos. I found it a silent and small yet powerful idiom as it swayed gently in the breeze whilst through the window behind it people were visible rushing on by.

In our workshop week 4 I explored these materials further by using the plastic as an added lens over my camera which then captured scenes that were influenced and distorted by the plastic. The light and materiality of the plastic were key interests to me during this experimental period. I shot in different rooms in the house wanting to utilise the concern of the domestic space as well as natural lighting from the windows.

At home I discovered another spiderweb and endeavoured to explore it - this time in my own backyard- and had a sense of looking through the spiderweb into the domestic domain beyond.

After consulting with Chris I decided to explore further using plastic as a filter through which to view the world and I wanted to push the experimentation further by trying different opaque and transparent materials such as organza, cellophane and the catalyst for this path of experimentation : cobweb paper as inspired by the natural cobwebs I had been interested in previously.

Of particular interest during this period of experimentation was the question of where to focus- the material or the room beyond.

As I was working certain elements of the readings Chris had posted started to inform my experimenting process. From Carolyn Walker Bynum's contribution to the article on Materiality (Rosler et al. 2013, p. 12  Notes from the field) I learned her stance that medieval devotional objects should be understood more as the presence of the holy rather than being just symbols or icons or indexes of the holy. She states that the closer you come to the inner shrine the 'central encounter with the holy' then the more 'tactile and three-dimensional the scene' and in this way 'the inner shrine both emphasises and sublimates its stuffness'. In an interesting paradox Bynum sees these shrines as displaying 'earthly mutable, malleable stuff as lifted into heavenly changelessness'. Bynum explores this further and goes on to state that for medieval believers 'the entire universe is Gods creation and manifestation ... Gods footprints'  and as the nun Mechtild saw in  a vision that all creatures and particles on earth are 'caught up in the humanity of Christ' thus when these statues and altarpieces etc called 'attention to themselves as material stuff they asserted themselves to be creation, the expression of the divine'.

I became interested for my project to search for and show the expression of the divine through the materiality of the 'filters' and in this way bring the binaries of the material and the sacred together in the domestic space - a site of the routine and mundane - to explore that maybe there each moment is still infiltrated with the sacred. As Ann Voskamp writes 'though time moves on and the planet spins, a blur its moments are holy. And you can slow and you can wake  and you can trust and find the joy that you are aching for by paying attention to all the moments with your whispered offering of thanks. Because this is how you begin to spend your one life well- receiving each moment for what it really is: holy, ordinary, amazing grace.' (Voskamp 2013, p. 7 One thousand gifts).

This for me also helped clarify photography/ the digital image as a relevant medium to explore the idea of time based moments yet to also make them timeless in a sense.

Another reading that helped me along this path of enquiry and exploration was from the same paper written by Michael Ann Holly. Holly states that she sees materiality as 'the meeting of matter and imagination- the place where opposites take refuge from their perpetual strife' (Rosler et al. 2013, p. 15  Notes from the field). Holly is exploring materiality in the light of  digitalisation and opposes Bill Brown's idea that materiality has a new sense of urgency due to 'the "threat" of digital media' stating instead that these digital images themselves have a 'presence'  even though are disembodied from the material world and that they enrich our perceptions and stretch our 'visionary capacities'. Holly concludes by stating that 'the fact that the image is neither here nor there does not mean its immaterial. It is an event in the world .... and evinces tangibility sometimes without physical touch and even might cunningly illustrate materiality without being material'.

Deb Mansfield's Armchair traveller also helped me to think about this idea of bringing binaries together and n this way creating another space, another way to view things which is what I was hoping for my project ... well these first steps towards a resolved outcome.

Bibliography

Rosler et al.  March 2013, Notes from the field: materiality, The Art Bulletin, pp. 11-37.

Voskamp, A 2012 One thousand gifts, Zondervan, Grand Rapids Michigan.