CROSS SECTION

It’s funny how retrospective analysis can sometimes crystallise things with more clarity than any plan ever could. The first week of semester 2 is done, and what I made over the break has held up to the external forces of people’s perception.

I’m not so worried about impenetrability. More that the carriage has fallen off the track without me realising.

I cannot remember when I made this. Like I have no idea what the date was.

I had the idea last semester that I would keep re-using the mannequin, reconstituting it over and over and over again until I had disfigured it enough to satisfy some unnameable criteria that stopped it from dominating my crits.

I remade the mannequin once before. I sawed the paper mache torso in half (below). The pink particles became aerated by the back and forth of the saw, collecting like dust bunnies on my desk.

Now the halves sit like husks in an unused studio and I think they’re growing mould.

It was horrible to cut into it like that. I had become so close to the effigy and my hands had pressed into all its layers. I’m not really sure why I did it. Or why I tried to do it again.

This time (above) was no better. The pins and staples I had used to re-attach the hunks of foam together cut my hands. The fabric was crusted to its exoskeleton. It wasn’t going quietly and it didn’t want me to have anything left of it to reconstruct. The styrofoam came off in flakes I scooped out with a knife. It all went in the bin.

I saved an oval of the external material from the figure’s right rib. I was very careful with this. By the end of this process I had a lump in my throat, and I had to stop a few times to breathe and/or cry.

The rib was the cleanest excavation.

It was in this state that I constructed the chair and its legs.

I don’t remember much of the process of making the legs. I scavenged bits of wood from the workshop and prep room. I scored the hoses from someone who didn’t need them anymore. The little chair was out front of a neighbour’s house with some other kid’s stuff. The hooves I had made a week before. They were carved and about leather-dry at that point.

I think I approached the construction from the inside out: skeleton, joints, muscle and skin. I kept adding and adding wood and hose until my shoulder gave. The drill always fucks with me, and I was sore for days afterwards. It took a bit to get it to stand. And even then, it had this twisting inwards which I couldn’t understand.

I had been deliberate in my evenness. The two front legs were the same, as were the two back legs, like any animal. Like, I constructed them simultaneously. I didn’t finish one and then move on to the next. But the material didn’t care about my planning and did what it wanted.

I was really happy with the form but I was going rabid. It was as tall as me (pretty much) and I was basically wrestling with it physically ad psychologically. A lot of what drew me into object-making was the idea of agency and control. I think this motivator peaked with the miniatures.

This was different. I had given over control to this thing. And not even given willingly, it had slowly encroached its autonomy until i couldn’t not collaborate. And I resented and respected it for that.

I harp on about ecology and ethical relationality and dialogue between material and artist (Isadora Vaughan i love u).

But giving over real agency in practice is delicate and kind of laborious in its difficulty. I don’t realise what the work is telling me until I’m hit over the head with it. It requires a vulnerability/empathy that is hard to find in the moment of production.

And clay is such a potent vehicle for this dialogue as metonym for flesh. The mixing with oil and fragrance and fragments of old pieces stops any one work from really ending.

I need to get better at listening out for when it really just wants to be laid down to rest.