Dominique Edwards

Feelthings, Opening Address by Virginia MacKenny

Dominique Edwards – Feelthings 

Some thoughts on Dominique Edwards’ work for Feelthings exhibition opening 26.09.2019, delivered with extemporisation.

Virginia MacKenny, Associate Professor of Painting, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

 

To look at Edwards’ work is not to see it.

A constant question arises: “What am I looking at?”

So where to start?
Perhaps a few precedents: Modernist precedents:

  Hepworth, Moore, Arp, Brancusi

  And thoughts about Abstraction

 

Barbara Hepworth – a leading British sculptor who dominated the early part of the 20C, a peer with Henry Moore. Both achieved success with what was called Direct Carving: No models or sketches or maquettes. Form and abstraction arose from the material. Edwards works in the same manner. While she draws and makes notations on the sculpture as it is in progress, the manner in which it will develop cannot be fully realised in any way other than by the doing of it.

Hepworth, when working in wood and stone, wrote: that ‘there are essential stone shapes and essential wood shapes which are impossible for me to disregard.’ 

Edwards doesn’t work in wood or stone. Her material is not already formed, it has no apparent history embedded in it. 

 

PLASTER OF PARIS
Gypsum plaster: a fine white powder (calcium sulfate hemihydrate)
Prepared from the abundant gypsum found near Paris, hence its name. 
Hardens when moistened and allowed to dry. 

It is, in a sense, inchoate. So, what within it must Edwards pay attention to? 

Plaster of Paris: Does not generally shrink or crack when dry, making it an excellent medium for casting molds.

 It is the medium of the model, 

the maquette, 
the cast
the mold.

The primary initiating form,
normally secondary to the final object. 
Here becomes/is the final form

Edwards’ final forms are made from accretions of plaster. Accretions not found in nature, but made by the artist. Form found through accretion and removal, repeated and repeated and repeated. Both a Subtractive and Additive process.

Michelangelo, a subtractive sculptor, revelled in revealing the form within the stone, releasing it – had some not small scorn for those who built up what they conceived within their own minds…  

BUT Edwards’ forms are so variously built up, displaced, reconstituted, sanded down, reformed, modified, adjusted and revised that in the interstices of the actions, action upon action, there is an organic quality that is not unlike Michelangelo’s process of discovery of what exists within the material. The medium, initially a powder, may be the perfect vehicle for a conversation between both Subtractive and Additive process/methods.

Plaster of Paris: the medium that holds and fixes the break. 

That which we associate with healing broken limbs, becomes that limb. Small bonelike forms that Edwards calls ligaments – the fibrous connective tissue that connects bones to other bones.

All titled The Ends of Things. 

But also, presumably, the beginnings of things, given that ligaments allow things apart to move, AND stay together. 

During 1947–1949 Hepworth produced a series of surgical drawings and paintings based on her time observing doctors and surgeons at work at St Mary’s hospital in Exeter. These works were made when her daughter was suffering from a bone disease. The surgeon invited Hepworth to come into the operating theatre to make sketches – in one instance of the surgical procedure of fenestration of the ear. 

Such concerns with the body seem to have parities with Edwards’ work.

In a studio visit: I remember, in the background, small weavings made of gut. An apron, a sausage tube, a net. Hints of inner organs, soft organs, digestion. Interior things. 

Is this exhibition a dismembered body into which, within which, we walk? Are we between parts of the whole.

I note how many titles relate to the body:

Lap
the Palm and the Hand
The Milk Tooth and the Funny Bone

Or actions of the body: 

Slumber
Swallow
Wake

Conflating the two Edwards, in conversation distinguishes the largest piece on the show ‘A Constant Hum’ as ‘throat’ 

And then there are conditions of being: 
Cold Shoulder, Warm Hearted
No Hard Feelings
 

The latter seems a pun on the entire show…

Hard medium, soft appearance.

To return to that initial question “What am I looking at?”
To understand what one sees – one comprehends that one side cannot reveal all. Even when one moves around these forms we are never in full possession of them. Like most sculptural form you can’t hold all in a glance or two, or three…
We can never, visually, fully realise them. 
Even when in the presence of just one. Even when touching it. 

This inability to grasp what we see seems, however, to posit a means to bridge the gulf between the corporeal and the conceptual.

The attempt to see, to understand seems central to comprehending connections. The act of seeing is part of the equation, the attempt to find meaning here … 

Again to look – all the sculptural forms are WHITE
  such WHITENESS

For Hepworth: the use of white emphasises the inner structure of the work, but, in this instance, it might be useful to turn to painters to understand what whiteness may do.

Lucien Freud:
“Full saturated colours have an emotional significance I wish to avoid”.

Robert Ryman:
” The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible”. 

Or perhaps, particularly usefully here, David Salle: 
“The subject exists inside of its shadows. That’s part of the way we see the subject. It’s not about dragging something out into the light, some glaring gaze. It’s about something being developed or caressed by shadows or revealed within shadows, or just falling into shadow.”

In Edwards’ sculpture her caressing hand coaxes a startling whiteness into being – it brings light into cavities. It makes shadows and dissipates appearance. It unsettles our certitude of form rather than emphasising the inner structure of the work, as it does for Hepworth. 

These things are intensely optical objects. Eyes attempt to fix form and fail.

Certainly Hepworth understood this difficulty of perception. in 1937 she took a double exposure of one of her white sculptures entitled Double Exposure of Two Forms:  the double overlapping image, while ostensibly giving more information, makes the original form difficult to determine. Where does one form, the same form just from a different angle, begin and end? The single photograph attempts to hold a more complex sense of dimension. Tries to apprehend it. Fails to do so.

An expectation of Whiteness is that it creates lightness. Because we see with light, because light enables our vision, we expect things to be clearer when whiteness is around. 
But here whiteness creates invisibility.
We expect the illuminated surface to reveal. But somehow it doesn’t. 
The forms are nascent. The whiteness prevents us from discerning them in their fullness.

Rather like Anish Kapoor’s impossible-to-see interiors covered in dusted pigment.

Does this shining white perfection scatter our perception larger than we can grasp? 

The forms are extraordinarily elusive.

Perhaps there should only be ONE person in the gallery when looking at this work for it takes utter concentration to see it – if one even can.

Perhaps touch reveals more…

The capacity of Touch to enable sight perhaps is best developed when one is blind. 

When one is Blind what does one see? 
What does one make of it?

Or is there another kind of blindness here?

Our preconceived perceptions are unsettled. Whiteness is so often perceived as rightness. Rightness often stops us from seeing.

In Documenta 11, 2002, Alfredo Jaar presented Lament of the Images: 
experimenting with image deprivation as a kind of visual homeopathy, asserting 
”Our society is blind,”.
 ”We have lost our ability to be affected by imagery”.
His exhibition started with a corridor dominated by a searing, blindingly white, spotlight and some tales about the darker side of whiteness: 

If I can’t properly see what I am look at because of its very properties, how do I know what I am looking at? And how should I respond to this difficulty? 

It feels a little like the mystic Cloud of Unknowing – an anonymous Christian mystic text of the medieval period in the latter half of the 14th century. Its injunction is to abandon consideration of God’s particular activities and attributes, and be courageous enough to surrender one’s mind and ego to the realm of “unknowing”, at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of God. 

It is a version of the Via Negativa – a road to discovering God as a pure entity, beyond any capacity of mental conception and so without any definitive image or form. This state of knowing is brought about by putting all thoughts and desires under a “cloud of forgetting” – thereby making oneself open to the unknown.

For Edwards, the process of making seems to have been an intense journey into a form of knowing, by engaging the unknown. It is a form of relationship that is particularly intimate.

Hepworth:
“From the Sculptor’s point of view, one can either be the spectator of the object or the object itself”. Hepworth delivers the thought: “For a few years I became the object” 

Perhaps Edwards is the object too.

A white fragile material brought to polished perfection through hours and hours and hours of labour – a surface, a form, which a casual fingernail can destroy. 

 

But this is not all. 
There are Black drawings – layered ink transparencies. That seem to be more present, seem to reveal. Connections appear with the white forms, but similarities hold in opposition – the form of the black drawings find their shape through the spread of ink reaching its limit, they define their own form.
But they are also so black in places they flatten and conceal all. Obliterate. 
Like brain scans – they have patches that darken, that we cannot see into. 

Abstract they leave room for sensation. Feelthings.

‘Feelthings’ – the title is

 hard to say – like trying to talk with a lisp ….feel(th)ings….

‘Feelthings’ – a single word. If you say it quickly it sounds like ‘feelings’

Things that feel? 

The feel of things?

 The act of feeling things?

 Things that hold feeling?

A thing that feels like a thing? 

What does this thing feel like? 

Connecting touch to gut

A thought: what if the forms, with their “difficult-to-seeness” and their invitation to touch, represent their maker, the human maker, as conduit of nature – as opposed to separate from nature? Not a representation or even a re-presentation, of self. Culture nature maker. As one. Perhaps these are shapes within Edwards. Shapes/forms that are Edwards. Realisations. Made real. Forms that, like the essential shapes within wood and stone that Hepworth found impossible to disregard, are as impossible for Edwards to disregard because they are inextricably connected.

This is the 2nd exhibition that I have opened in a week that has been difficult to see. Is this the zeitgeist of the moment – an inability to see? A clear signal that we have become profligate with our attention, squandered it on the inconsequential? Is this the attendant call to pay attention to noticing?

We certainly need to sit up and take notice. Last week Climate change protests were held globally. Our planet is in trouble. We are in trouble. We need to act.

 But we can’t act without being connected

 – too much of that has already gone on. 

What does it mean to be present? 

Perhaps Edwards has, in her meditative practice been doing it for us – much in the manner of monks and nuns who, through the millennia, have engaged the monastic life of withdrawal – sequestered in order to pay deep attention. There have always been humans who have done this task for the rest of us.

BUT Perhaps Edwards is giving us something more, which will help in our own practice. 

A practice that needs to be a daily one. 

That we need to do individually and collectively. We certainly don’t know if our species will survive the damage we have done. We need to pay attention.

Speculative. A way of seeing/thinking/feeling differently.

Thank you, Dominique – for inviting us into a more intimate connection with the body of the world. Our bodies, our home.