Narrabesques more

Many people have helped me on my way - it is to you I wish to dedicate this lecture… NARRABESQUES Inaugural Lecture Professor Jivan Astfalck Birmingham Institute of Art and Design Birmingham City University 2009 The body-related objects that I make have narrative and performative dimensions. Like other forms of ‘writing’, the objects are used to open up access to a poetic or novelistic discourse, which faces reality by putting into play fiction, leading to understanding, explanation or discovery. Based on the idea that because of the ambiguity of the notion of the author, the narrative incompleteness of life, the entanglement of life histories in a dialectic of remembrance and anticipation, all add to the way in which we apply fiction to our lives, I make objects that act as mnemonic devices created to grasp the complexities and webs of relationships, which would otherwise be un-containable. I use and develop devices that aim to overcome the fragmented nature of assembled and cross-referenced work by integrating the object with the contexualising and framing device. In Desire in Language, for Language example, 1 Desire in Language assemblage in Julia Kristeva’s book ‘Desire in Language’, mixed media, sterling silver, coral, paper 2 a silver setting was made for a possibly Chinese piece of coral, which carries a carved image of a mermaid – half fish, half woman. The setting was heated and used to burn the same shape of paper out of the pages in Julia Kristeva’s book Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, the burning started at the chapter ‘Ambivalence’, and offered the best view of the coral piece at the chapter ‘The Subversive Novel’.1 Paul Ricouer, who I read extensively all through my PhD research, taught me in his book The Rule of Metaphor that if there exists supremacy of the metaphorical and poetic function over referential function it does not obliterate an interest in the reference, but it transcends the definable borders; it assumes that subjectivity is linked up with the profound objectivity of being.2 Only the dialectic between sense and reference says something about the relation between language and the ontological condition of being in the world. Language is not a world of its own, it is not even a world, but because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations, and because we orientate ourselves comprehensively in those situations, we have something to say, we have experience to bring to language and by extension to making. The Swedish art historian and writer Tom Sandquist said of my approach to the making of creative work: ‘Today we are confronted by a multiplicity of possibilities, so large as to make it almost impossible to survey, that is set in a territory where the needle of a compass points in all possible directions at the same time. We can, like Jivan Astfalck … choose more or less unreservedly to embrace the idea of the artist or craftsperson as a travelling narrator in ontology and the craft product as a narrative statement on several different levels of significance, some of them contradictory’3 The dialogical and dynamic relationship between the surveying of a wide range of literature, often at odds with each other, and the creative development of my practical work enabled me to elaborate on the narrative context of the work itself and to develop a methodology of making which is conscious of its own need for understanding and can be, in my view, shared and taught. In my work, theory is thus 1 The book is a hardbound copy of Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York: Columbia University Press 2 Ricoeur, P. (1994: 224) The Rule of Metaphor, London: Routledge 3 Sandqvist, T. The Impossible Fridge-Thoughts on Beauty, Crafts, and Art, Stockholm: IASPIS/CiD 3 reformulated as a dynamic encounter, a continuous re-figuration within a tradition of commentary and interpretation. A sensuous approach… even though often deconstructed, then reconstructed with a reconfigured and ‘whispering’ critical agenda. iHear to be worn inside the ear - shell from the beach of the Isle of Skye, foam cover from my iPod headphones,diamonds,vintage jewellery box from London Stating in his preface to The Art of the Novel that the world of theories is not his world, Kundera approaches the polyphonous nature of fiction as a practitioner. He explains that ‘in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetre longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognisable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end - You see, not wonder at the immeasurable infinity of the soul; rather, wonder at the uncertain nature of the self and its identity.’4 4 Kundera, M. (1986: 28) The Art of the Novel, New York: Grove Press 4 Vanitas - A Meditation on Beauty and Decay neckpiece, silver electroformed organic mater, plastic, silk The organic matter coated by the electroformed silver skin in my piece Vanitas reasserts itself on the surface again… creating an unstable piece that continuously changes. Over time the piece, while embodying a change of identity towards the unrecognisable, can be seen simultaneously as past, present and future – of course, also in terms of the art historical reference. Rather than relating to abstract thought both the writer and the maker express their interest in the action, in the situation itself. They assert that in creative engagement reflection changes essence, it becomes part of the realm of play and of hypothesis. Artistic works, informed by abstract ideas, are not in themselves the illustrations of those ideas. ‘Imagination’ Kundera says, ‘which, freed from the control of reason and from 5 concerns about appearing true, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought. The dream is only the model for the sort of imagination that I consider the greatest discovery of modern art’.5 Rather than creating a fusion of dream and reality, Kundera uses what he calls ‘polyphonetic confrontation’, novelistic counterpoint that unites philosophy, narrative and imagination within the ordered unity of his stories. To relate this idea visually, I use the image of the last screenshot in Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia as semaphore in my own practice. The image shows an exquisitely crafted scene that re-values utopian dreams and their failure, melancholically examining the decay, detritus and diffident survivals of historical modernity - a metaphor of loss and an attempt to visualise utopian nostalgia. 5 Kundera, M. (1986: 83) The Art of the Novel, New York: Grove Press 6 GalGal - Gal Sterling silver, pearls, turquoise, silver-electroformed feather, Tibetan prayer beads carved from Buffalo bone, silver-electroformed Oak-twig and leaf, cotton Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 8th Elegy The word "angel" in English (from Old English and German Engel), French (from Old French angele), Spanish, and many other Romance languages are derived from the Latin angelus, itself derived from Koine Greek: άγγελος, angelos, "messenger" (pl. άγγελοι). The ultimate etymology of that word in Greek is uncertain. In Hebrew & Arabic the primary term for "angel" is "malakh" (‫" ,)ְ ָאְלַמ‬malaika", or "malak" (‫ )كالم‬derived from the Semitic consonantal root l-'-k (‫ ,) -א-ל‬meaning "to send." This root is also found in the noun "Melakha" (‫ ,)הָכאָלְמ‬meaning "work", and the noun "Mal'achut" (‫ ,)תוכאלמ‬meaning "message". Other words referring to [3] angels include ‫ בורכ‬kruv describing young children, from which the English word "cherub" is derived. Another Hebrew term is Gil-Gulim, meaning "revolving," and angels are sometimes depicted as wheels with wings. Derived from this is the Hebrew term "Gal-Gal," "the rotation of fortune, change" 7 Palimpsests of creation, form, narrative, disintegration and re-integration stand in stark contrast to Modernism’s ideal of the purified form and autonomous object. They allow forms of the past to emerge and to coexist, sometimes as fragments or ruins, alongside a riot of other references (including those of modernism), while searching for a new sense of identity and meaning – like I saw emerging from the layered cosmos of ornamentation in this stunningly impressive graffiti from Metelkova in Ljubljana, Slovenia by an unknown artist. Metelkova is an internationally renowned alternative culture community, a self-declared 'Autonomous Culture Zone’ in the centre of Slovenia's capital.6 Metelkova Mesto occupies the former 'Fourth of July' military barracks originally commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian army back in 1882 and completed in 1911. The space consists of seven buildings and 12,500m2 - making it a sort of city within a city - comprising a former prison, several clubs, live music spaces, art galleries and artist studios. 6 8 I am interested in the layered, often hidden, undercurrents of subjective narratives, which, in my view, we all invest in creative works, especially those which are utopian-nostalgic, where nostalgia is projected into a future – not a reactionary clinging to the past, but rather the idea that certain kinds of progress are full of loss and might not be life-enhancing and sustainable, a gesture of resistance. In all our experience in the world of action there is a general need for personalising what is alien to us in order to understand it, even if this understanding is ultimately recognised as an illusion. Stories, signs and symbols are thus appropriated in a process of assimilation and cross-referenced metaphorical re-investment. The ‘interior infinite’, a term I borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin, who’s writings is another important theoretical undercurrent in my research and related to Kundera’s notion of imagination, makes it possible to liberate the individual imagination from dogmatism, completeness and limitation. It makes it possible to create new metaphors, which describe a mode where our world can undergo a change and fairy tales and fiction can introduce the strange and unusual. In this interior place narratives can be turned up-side down, turned around and mixed so that Snow-white competes with Siegfried, Daphne falls in love with Odysseus and Phedra never turns mad. The ‘interior infinite’ can disclose the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life, precisely because it can describe the potentiality of a utopiannostalgic golden age, which can facilitate the bridging of separate fields of study, but also bridge the semantic gaps and holes obvious within their own separate discourses. And so I imagined myself as Snow-white and an Eve, my gender, mind and self forever caught up in the history of reason and of fiction - I have lived the story’s line and suffered its confusion. I learned from Snow-white that when poisoned and unconscious, not really dead but then not aging either, life returns when emotions are jump-started, ideally by a beautiful prince, but I think the story is too optimistic in this respect… I bought four of the reddest apples I have ever seen at Marks & Spencer. 9 From one of the apples… I took, with great care, twenty-three bites. 10 After drilling a hole into all of the pieces, I dipped them repeatedly in polyester resin. It took four coats until the apple pieces were sealed airtight and, after curing of the resin, I made a necklace from the apple-beads. I used paper-rope to string the beads and 18 ct gold to hold the beads in place, all beautiful materials in their own right, only I have changed their hierarchy in terms of value and of meaning. Apple, like other organic matter contains water and sugar, and even though it is sealed off from the air, life continues to take place. The essential feature namely the apple-matter in the resin shells gradually disintegrated. Now after all this time, only transparent blobs of resin and a little bit of apple-skin are left over… 11 I cast my kiss in sterling silver and made a brooch… The remaining three red apples I pretended to eat; but then spat out the pieces repeatedly, which was filmed by my husband-prince – the first of my videos… 12 The film material was looped to run for three hours and was shown alongside the other work. The necklace and brooch was exhibited in a glass case positioned in a field of 100 red apples, which over a period of four weeks deteriorated into piles of mush, whereas the deterioration of the apple matter in the resin beads could not be detected. Two features of the work cannot be communicated here, but have been very important. The work was exhibited in the Atrium Gallery of the School of Jewellery and one was ‘hit’ by both sound and smell when entering the building. The sound coming from the video, the biting into the apple, suggested violence and it took the viewer some time to figure out the source of that sound. At the same time the delightfully sweet and seductive smell of the rotting apples pervaded the building, which surprisingly only in the very last few days of the exhibition developed a sickening note, at which point the caretaker, who demanded much earlier that the work should be removed, finally succeeded at this stage. Dentata, It seems fitting to me to speak about Tacita Dentata which was the first work I exhibited at the School of Jewellery, Birmingham City University, when I first came to work there 10 years ago, it was so radical then… and this year I have been awarded a professorial chair for ‘Jewellery Art and Design’, acknowledging and celebrating that the subject area of jewellery making is extending its traditional boundaries, bridging art, design and craft. Something had been made and hands have been moving, fingers and lips interacted with material - apple, gold, paper, resin and silver; so much we know and appreciate as necessary truth, but neither properties of materials, nor of tools, not even of the emerging object are necessarily part of its meaning. The exploration of the idea of making as being essentially poetic, or by extension novelistic, opens a different if somewhat complicated possibility to utilise self-reflectivity and fiction to generate creative work.7 In addition, if we read the object as we would read a poem or a novel, conscious of its structure but at the same time allowing for our own projections and fictional investments, the hidden might unfold and imagination can be shared. This let to an un-going series of works, where my research concerns, related to narrative structures imbedded in creative objects, have been explored in a wider application than my own studio practice. The aim was to transfer already developed artistic strategies to the learning and teaching of students and by 7 Jivan Astfalck “Poiema - Work and Fiction" in Pamela Johnson (ed.) Ideas in the Making: Practice in Theory, Crafts Council Publication, London 1998 13 extension to the interaction with other groups of people. The objectives were to facilitate and enhance experiential learning through a practical project that viewed design development in a narrative and selfreflective context, and to encourage critical practice in a soft and non-threatening way that felt enabling. Lifelines, Lifelines for example, developed out of a BA year2 project and has been conducted with our BA students, with students in Northern Ireland and Germany and I now conduct the project with our MA students… apart from in the School we exhibited in Idar-Oberstein in Germany, Florence and Manchester. More than 120 lines have been generated by now and I hope that one day I will have the opportunity to exhibit the whole of the installation at a ‘United Nations-type’ of event… For those of you who wish to know more about the context and concept development of the project, the paper is published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society http://www.Arts-Journal.com 14 Projects like this, my attitude towards teaching creative subjects, and my commitment to experiential learning is underpinned by my understanding that creative practice is different to day dreaming and escape, I quote from Tillmann Habermas’s Geliebte Objekte - Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung (Beloved objects: symbols and instruments of identity-formation)8. He says: ‘creative activity necessitates a turning of attention and activates exploration, a deeper acknowledgment and consideration of reality, in as much as the creative act reshapes reality. In the creative activity it is not enough to surrender to the spontaneous ideas of daydreaming. More importantly the feasibility of such ideas needs to be judged from the perspective of the material, which is to be transformed, and from the critical perspective of an audience’s aesthetic considerations. Such judgments in turn need to feed back into the creative process. In so far as this would allow a critical ‘I’ to be part of the creative process, an ‘I’ that plans instrumental work procedures and judges the object aesthetically. Creative production differentiates itself from daydreaming through the self-critical change of perspectives, which facilitates the shift from idiosyncratic product to a cultural object.’ (my translation) Within the area of metaphorical symbolisation I am interested in jewellery pieces and related objects that map out the demarcation lines, where body meets world, a place, or idea of a place, where narratives are invested in objects with the aim to negotiate that gap, complexity, confusion or conflict. My aim is to achieve an imagery of the unconscious and address symbolisation by using metaphoricity to cross-map emotional investments conducive to new creative articulation and representation - a contemporary practice of ‘reliqua manufactura’… enshrining fictionalised emotional investments. Habermas, T. (1999: 402f) Kreativitaet: Formen und Schreiben, in Geliebte Objekte. Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 8 15 Behind the popular, glossy magazine images of the Berlin Wall lie other images and memories that are much more the images with which I grew up… …while the rest of Germany boomed into economical success, much of Berlin remained rough and edgy… like weeds in unlikely places, 16 people in Berlin demonstrated vigorous survival skills, sharp like razors, but often pretty to look at and after all it is those weeds that can, given the right circumstances, pull down walls… 17 Represented in three linked necklaces, Wiesenblumen are handmade silver representations of five Wiesenblumen endangered British wild flowers or weeds in Sterling Silver (I grew up in the British sector of West-Berlin); exhibited together with a piece of the Berlin Wall, which I have taken myself from the Wall in the winter of 1989. The silver is milled very thin and hard and even though the necklace looks so pretty and seductive, it is almost un-wearable and sharp as razors… 18 ‘Beauty’, People ‘Beauty’ says Louise Bourgeois, ‘ is a series of experiences, it is not a noun. People have experiences. If they feel an intense aesthetic pleasure, they take that experience and project it into the object. They experience the idea of beauty, but beauty in and of itself does not exist. To put it another way, pleasures experiences are sorts of pleasures that involve verbs. The fallacy occurs in taking the experience of ‘I like x’ and referring to ‘x’ as beauty. In fact, beauty is only a mystified expression of our own emotion.” emotion. 9 My installation On Memory and Loss was about the childhood fantasy of a little girl who wants to be an American Indian. The work for the Hastings Museum was not strictly speaking about American Indian culture in a historical, anthropological or socio-political way, but rather it was my response to the collection of American Indian artefacts exhibited at the Hastings Museum, which all through the collection references ‘Grey Owl’ the Hastings boy who went to the States only to come back as an ‘American Indian’ – a fact which was only discovered after his death in 1938. I used a multi-media format to create a narrative space, in which the individual pieces of work, some of which I had made and some, which came from the Museum’s collection, interacted dialogically. Apart from wearable objects the installation contained two videos, both about the signified body, identity formation and its ambivalent meaning. 9 Louise Bourgeois in a conversation with Bill Beckley in Beckley, B. with Shapiro, D. (eds.) (1998) Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards New Aesthetics, New York: Allworthy Press 19 Kinder, Kinder video (1966/2001), I made with my father, who enthusiastically used his super-8 camera equipment all through our childhood. In 1966 he made this film clip, which showed my two brothers and me coming out of the woods dressed as Indians. To my great delight I was given the showcase, which usually displayed objects that belonged to Alistair Crowley, another Hastings boy who underwent dramatic identity transformation … I had the super-8 film sequence translated into video format and looped for continuous showing. The video was shown inside the lower compartment of the display cabinet, with the door slightly ajar. The work was most successful with visiting children, who thought that this was cinema for little people and on more than one occasion the museum-guards had to removed children, who had climbed into the compartment for better viewing. Oskenonion, The other video I made for On Memory and Loss was Chief Oskenonion The video is pretty and nasty at the same time. It shows a portrait photograph I found in the archives, this time of a ‘Grey Owl’ chief. You see the portrait of the ‘manly’ man in full-frame, then my hands move in with coloured crayons. At first I only colour his costume and body adornment, I make him pretty by using a childlike ‘painting by numbers’ approach to colouration, but soon this activity becomes more invasive 20 and transgressive. At first the scalp is coloured blond, than his eyes made blue and so forth till his face carries a white ‘skin’ like a mask. On top of the white skin another layer of red is applied – after a little while he ends up looking like a caricature of himself, a very bad joke indeed… A transparent piece of paper interjects the gaze of the viewer and the loop starts again from the beginning... again, again and again. The Other though, does not necessarily have to be what needs to be repressed, but can be understood as a constituting factor in the self-image that a subject builds up. The Other is the perceiving, conscious, meaning-conferring other person who helps, or forces, the conscious subject to define his/her own worldpicture and subsequently define his/her own view of his/her place within it. Knowledge then, in this context, can be understood as the resulting world-picture built up, which partly comes about through the instrumentality of other people. Therefore this needs to be understood not only as a psychological dynamic, but also as a social, socialising and socialised process. Bakhtin10 taught me that poetic complicity situates itself between discourse and the world. He argues that in the case of the poetic image, the dynamic of the image takes place between the world in all its aspects and the object in all its complexity. The creator of a work, using language or any other material, is faced with a multiplicity of possible pathways that have been already established by social practice and cultural production. Along with all the internal contradictions of the work itself, the artist is also faced with the multitude of interpretations already laid out by social conventions and their resulting confusion of meanings, which surround both the object and the social situation. The meaning of the object is always interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it. In the The Meeting of Hands and Hearts - We, that is me, an artist and jeweller, Kate Paxman, an artist and photographer, and Andy Horn from Craftspace here in Birmingham, an exhibition organiser, worked with a group of women (2004), who are refugees and at the time lived in Birmingham, who had pasts we did not know much about and whose cultural reference systems and languages are different to ours. They are often excluded from mainstream arts activity and traditionally might have little contact with arts organisations. Within the framework of an exhibition process we sought to explore questions of personal identity, individual difference and notions of ‘otherness’ through the familiar and inter-related media of body ornamentation, crafts and photography. 10 Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination, Austin Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981 21 As art school educated artists/makers we come from a very privileged position; we take the playful engagement with the world of appearances for granted. We are used to create work methodologies, which not only engender the making of artefacts, but which also express highly complex relationships and reference systems, often much more eloquent than everyday language could achieve. Our project needed to be designed for people who do not necessarily share this attitude, who had a very basic idea about how we read crafts in an contemporary context, what art is or can be, who speak a wide variety of languages, none of which we understand, and who, at the beginning at least, have been much too shy to speak at all. At the same time it would have been pointless to surrender our own identities as artists. We wanted to create a project where all participants were collaborators, not consumers, and to create work, which could survive critical scrutiny in a contemporary art/crafts context. And so we began our project by shaking hands... ‘Shaking Hands’ might not be regarded as a gesture of universal cultural significance; there exist taboos that govern the relationships between women and men in some cultures. Working in a mostly female group eased some of the complications we might have encountered otherwise. The meaning of the gesture, expressing the friendly but respectful meeting of the other person was significant to everybody. As we touched each other’s hands in greeting we had a little lump of clay between the so-called heart-area of our hands, making beads in the process. The clay retained traces of two sets of hand lines, unique to each individual. Two written scrolls of paper were added, containing each a little bit of information gained from 22 each other about what the other person loved. Everybody who was at CIP (Community Integration Project) that day got involved, the participants of the project, friends who happened to come along, all the treasured children, arts organisers, CIP and MRC (Midland’s Refugee Council) employees. We sealed the text pieces with pure gold... Finally I chose a fluorescent pink nylon rope to visually emphasising the connection, the threading together of all our stories, and transformed the separate pieces, like prayer beads, into one whole necklace. 23 Jivan Astfalck, Origin: Jivan meets Sukran, meets Falila, meets Kate, meets Meryem, meets Andy, meets Kate, Linda, meets Anita, meets Dorothy, and meets Jocelyne. Jocelyne meets Kat e, meets Andy, meets Sukran, meets Marie, meets Brigitte, meets Deirdre, meets Meryem, meets Falila, meets Dorothy, and meets Yvette. Yvette meets Paramjit, meets Jocelyne, meets Brigitte, meets Falila, meets Anita, meets Meltem, and meets Barbara. Barbara meets Yvette, meets Dally, meets Deirdre, meets Shylet, meets Meryem, meets Andy, meets Jocelyne, and meets Marie. Marie meets Jivan, meets Paramjit, and meets Andy. Andy meets Jocelyne, meets meets Dally, and meets Anita. Anita meets Barbara, meets Yvette, meets Falila, and meets Brigitte. Brigitte meets Jivan, meets Marie, meets Dally, meets Andy, meets Anita, and meets Shylet. Shylet meets Andy, meets Jivan, meets and meets Deirdre. Deirdre meets Paramjit, meets Marie, meets Brigitte, meets Melten, meets Jivan, meets Anita, meets Dally, and meets Sukran. Sukran meets Meryem, meets Dally, meets Jocelyne, meets Andy, meets Meryem, meets Selmi, meets Linda, and meets Melten. Melten meets Dally, meets Linda, meets Brigitte, meets Andy, and meets Paramjit. Paramjit meets Dally, meets Kate, meets Jivan, meets Anita, and meets Linda. Linda meets Anita, meets Dally, and meets Kate. Kate meets Deirdre, meets Sukran, meets Meryem, meets Andy, meets Anita, and meets Dorothy. Dorothy meets Anita, meets Deirdre, meets Andy, meets Brigitte, meets Dally, and meets Falila. Falila meets Deirdre, meets Brigitte, meets Andy, meets Meryem, meets Barbara, meets Jocelyne, meets Anita, meets Dorothy, meets Kate, and meets Jivan. © 24 We had bought a complete set of white crockery for 20 people, plates, bowls, mugs and all. We were mindful of Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’, which had become an almost iconic format for investigating dynamics of gender roles, femininity and the domestic, as well as the more recent dinner service by Magdalene Odundo, which focused on double identities in cultural readings. However, most previously established artist dinner sets, even though they re-appropriate aesthetics of the hand-made and the domestic and relate to a non-gallery context, nevertheless remained pristine showpieces, untouchable and exclusive. We wanted to take this into a different direction and to re-connect the static, designed and sculptural crockery pieces with lived experience. We wanted work which looked odd, confounded established aesthetic expectations and carried the chaotic traces life always leaves behind reaffirmed on the surface of the crockery pieces. We extracted the (by now computer manipulated – we had taught he participants scanning and some introduction to PhotoShop) images the women had created about their own lives in Birmingham and printed them onto decals, which were cut, collaged, pasted and applied to the crockery. 25 ... then we organised a great feast. The women volunteered to prepare a meal such as they would cook at home for a special occasion, they did that with great pride, enormous care and commitment. We had food from ten different countries and some of the dishes inspired the telling of stories from childhood, about mothers and grandmothers who taught the women how to cook these dishes… and yes, there were tears as well… 26 Life experience merged with aspects of performance, distinctions blurred between performer and audience, and the crockery pieces got thoroughly and satisfyingly wrecked in the process. In order to exemplify this dynamic we asked Joseph Potts to make a video, which not only documents the feast, but also highlights the performing aspects of the occasion. When exhibited together the video underlines and emphasises the fact that the crockery pieces are a memento to a happening and that the disrupting traces on the surface decoration are more significant than the design process the pieces have undergone beforehand. As with the previous pieces we had made together in this project, Our Feast was the culmination of our curiosity about the interface between life experience and the making of work, a place that is un-fixed and in flow. Traditional dualities of high and low, performed and real, memory and presence got blurred, common identities of craft, design, art, life, lost their boundaries without ever creating a vacuum. The outcome of the project consisted not only of the artefacts, which we can be exhibited, valued and scrutinised, but life experience, which has enriched us and enabled us to create new understanding of the work we do, of ourselves and of others. The resulting evaluation report of the project emphasised the positive outcome of the project by canvassing the responses from all participants of the project. Subsequently CIP considered artists-run project provision as part of their remit and applied successfully for further funding. The work was selected by Aralis, a non-government organization that promotes social inclusion and supports immigrant communities in Lyon and the Rhone-Alpes region. Having seen the work in Birmingham at the invitation of Birmingham City Council, Aralis selected our project to be exhibited at Traces, an established festival that highlights the lives and cultures of immigrant communities and refugees. For the same exhibition SELF of which The Meeting of Hands and Hearts was an action research project, I was commissioned to develop my own visual response. For that I wanted to bring to representation a much more brutal and ambiguous aspect of identity formation – and so, I took off my skin … 27 Hide refers to its own, somewhat curious meaning of ‘to cover’, ‘conceal’ ‘skin’, but also ‘measure of land’, with a relation to the ‘man’ who owns that measure of land… ’ “Myth ends up having our hides. Logos opens up its great maw and swallows us whole.” I motivated the work from this quote by Helen Cixous because much of her writing relies on Greek mythology and Freudian theory, and because she seeks to turn the narrative myths that dominate our culture upside down and inside out. Cixous believes that in order to escape the discourse of mastery we must begin to write the body - our sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked - to free one means freedom for the other. My aim when we made Hide was to create an object that is ambiguous in its reading. It might be a ‘skin’ that has been flayed off the body by torturous means or it might be an additional layer, a T-shirt, which could provide extra protection when worn. Maybe it is the representation of the wrinkly skin of Goya’s witches or a straightjacket, or maybe it is a skin left behind, like from a snake which shed a layer of skin to accommodate a growing and changing body. It is certainly ‘I’ and not ‘I’ at all... 28 I asked the filmmaker Anthony Budd and the choreographer and video artist Dennie Wilson to assist me realising the piece. Anthony filmed the whole process of making and performance; his film material was later used to create the documentary film for the exhibition and footage for the video, edited by Dennie and exhibited together. I used latex ‘again’, but as the material was meant to be applied directly to my body I had to find a product that was extremely low in ammoniac, so that my skin would not be damaged. I found such a product, a latex liquid produced by Kryolan, which is being used by professional make-up artist for theatre and film. For serendipitous reasons the product is manufactured in Berlin, which tied in neatly with the autobiographical content of the work. The idea was that my entire upper body, including arms but not hands, would be painted in latex, which after sufficient application of layers would be stable enough in 29 itself. I then would come out of it, without help, like a snake, and a full latex body cast would exist. My arms were propped up and Dennie proceeded to paint layers of latex on to my skin. The whole procedure took about six hours, with each layer of latex needing to cure properly before the next layer could be applied. As Dennie continued painting me she asked me questions about Hide and we engaged in performative conversation about the body, the female body, the aging body, the changing body – the beautiful and the deeply ambivalent… If we are to criticise the tendency of some contemporary philosophy to substitute theory for narrative as an aid for understanding, we might prefer the story’s ability to display different, if not contradictory, points of view and to simultaneously communicate diverse layers of meaning. The storyteller/artist/maker is not interested in establishing a distinction between reality and appearance, but creates a plurality of descriptions. The narrative structure does not privilege one single voice over the other but moves between multiple voices – it is polyphones… A Dynamic I explored in LOVE ZOO by placing made, ‘made-again’ and found pieces of jewellery onto early 1960s Steiff animals. The jewellery was chosen to suit the characters of the toy animals, which had been collected over a period of three years and had at least two previous owners. These animals have been chosen because they are exquisitely made, crafted, have ‘collectors value’ in their own right and refer to the autobiographical aspect of the work. Their cute pre-Disney nostalgic quality replaces the traditional display prop and re-configures the pieces of jewellery, offering reflection on the sentimental, emotional investment jewellery and transitional love objects have in common. 30 Zoo 1Love Z oo - Transitional Objects 1 - 30 31 Winnicott noted the strong attachment young infants regularly have to very specific objects - the worn out baby blanket or a particular cuddly toy, for example. Classically articulated as the child’s first ‘me’-‘not me’ object. The phenomenon of the transitional object is a marker of the ambivalent beginnings of negotiating an exterior reality. However, the transitional object is ‘transitional’ exactly because of its uncertain positioning for the child between internal-subjective and external-objective. It is its betweeness that marks the transitional object as significant and this is a phenomenon, which continually resurfaces in adulthood in various kinds of relationships with objects, especially those where sentimentality, superstition and meaning are invested. Love Zoo is a work that, significantly, must be understood within the context of a developing tradition of narrative jewellery. As a strand of jewellery making practice, narrative jewellery takes as one of its starting points the relationship between jewellery objects and meaning. A work of jewellery is not only a valuable object in terms of its craft, beauty and materially quantifiable worth - all of which might be translated as ‘proper’ values – proper in the sense of belonging to the object itself, objectively as its own properties. Within narrative jewellery the object is acknowledged, and in fact embraced, as an object of non-proper values - of values, which find their source in emotional and psychological investments. Thank you… © Prof. Jivan Astfalck, PhD School of Jewellery Birmingham Institute of Art and Design Birmingham City University 2009 32