HANGING SCULPTURE
HANGING SCULPTURE
"The possible is a structure of the real."
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980),
French Existentialist Philosopher,
"Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 2" (1960)
These art sculptures will feature vestigial and primary shapes, inspired from the well-spring of the future and from a common sense of inherency. The project aims to celebrate the role of "potentiality" in our lives. It is both suggestive of more practical potentials and those which are more abstract. The sculptures may evoke the meaningful and profound act of tribute to the lives and world of the observer, whether through daily, habitual, or more ritual activity.
The first phase of this project incorporates flat ceramic discs decorated with carvings, and some low surface protrusions. Each disc will be hung, bound together, and decorated with knotted natural fiber cord, or metal rings. The discs may be hung singly, in a vertical group, or batched horizontally from an additional main headway structure.
While functional ceramics surveys the ground-level, or horizontal plane, this project will audit the sky-level, or the vertical plane. It will indicate and reveal familiar qualities of art and design such as resource and procedure, but also more unique qualities such as concept, initiative, and potency.
Often, though not always, ceramic art tends towards observing practical design and parameters. This is largely due to the practicality of the durable and pliable material. For example, practical ceramic art designs abide natural forces and physical laws, such as pressure, temperature, or gravity. It is often constructed in terms such as scale, steadiness, counterweight, and balance - whether, a flat tiled tabletop, a deep pitcher with a curved spout, or a wide-handled serving spoon...
In this project, I aim to turn this mortal-age observation around once more. I pursue artful, celebratory, and radical qualities of design that will intimate the raw forces of nature. In the design, I consider the weight, diameter, circumference, and gravity of the forms, in order to view and evoke their more "testable" and "indicative" essences. In this way, the art and design confirms by exaggerating: the inherency of connectivity in raw nature as "potential".
While designing these sculptures, I have considered that over thousands of years and across thousands of civilizations, hanging art has served communities to inspire deep obligation and often dutiful consideration for nature's more 'antagonistic' forces (not in any amoral sense, but as in physics: pushing or pulling against). These natural forces have steadily influenced human cultures as they have evolved over millions of years.
Our ancestors were predominantly concerned (until very, very recently) with the raw forces of nature, as both their witness and as their tools for creation. Such as a bird in flight, or warm sunlight filtering through the trees, a chill in the air, or a dense cloud forming over a body of water; or thunder crashing and lightening striking; or vines crawling up the trunk of a tree, turning, and hanging back down from high up, in the tall branches; or, pulling food away from the mouth to tear at it with the teeth, or carrying water to your clan using an impermeable vessel; or an arrowhead arcing towards an unsuspecting buck; or sticks hurling over and down the edge of a waterfall, or a bonfire sending ashes soaring into the sky.
Over various epochs, our ancestors' cultural sensibilities towards these raw forces of nature developed into complex spiritual pursuits and soon traditions, and later even superstitions and dogma. Today, we often scientifically refer to these raw forces as gravity, velocity, atmospheric pressure, temperature, mass, resistance, directionality, lift, and orientation.
But our ancestors, for instance, relied on amulets or talismans worn across the chest or arms to confirm holy providence; they crafted artisan pendulums used to divine messages from the Spirit world; they hung flowing silk curtains to ensure the safe passage of one's ancestors among the ethereal realms of the Gods; they offered medicine bundles to the branches of sacrosanct trees, in hallowed devotion; they wore horns atop their heads, and sewed feathers into their hair, and bound animal teeth by cords to build a sense of heritage and ritual around the profound experience of rising, to live, and falling, to die; and much later, a monarch alone wore a golden crown atop his head as a "God-appointed" leader, sanctifying his 'holy reign' and purity in will. These are only some examples, and each has arisen and permeated many different corners of the globe.
More broadly speaking, hanging sculpture and design have served cultures by inspiring some bearing for observing one's purpose and place, in the larger and smaller world. As I develop the designs for this series, I want take into consideration the profoundness in global diversity, as well as the commonness of these cultural developments.
Many, many years ago, I had a dear friend who asked me, "do you think ancient cultures knew about gravity?" And I thought briefly, before slowly responding, "well, modernity didn't invent it... so, they were probably just calling it something else?"
However our ancestors conceptualized gravity, evolutionarily speaking our brain capacity has remained, in many more ways than not, the same as theirs. So, I hold their considerations in high esteem - whether, they had yet confirmed gravity as the quantum curvature of transdimensional space-time and the resulting accruing of fixed mass from the ever-present folding fabric of the universe, or they had not... (This, by the way, is 'gravity' according to NASA science today, which also, btw, no longer considers gravity a "force" in the proper scientific sense of the word...)
In a similar right, around 2,400 years ago, the Ancient Greek philosopher and rhetorician Aristotle conceptualized that our eyes and the air were part of a common medium, and that this medium enabled us to sense the world around us... His teacher, Plato, believed that beams of light emitted from the eyes, enabling us to see... How far off were they really, from conceptualizing 'folding space-time' or the physical influences of force? Alas, beyond concepts of right or wrong, I feel compelled and inspired by this purposefulness of creative imagination in the world.
I find the human heritage of conceptualizing, testing, communicating, and appreciating connectivity, antagonistic forces, directionality, orientation, and of course art, in natural forms, by natural laws, and using raw nature, inherently valuable and inspiring.
I have also started experimenting with stacked forms, which will soon be granted an independent project page. I look forward to developing the designs for these vessels to reflect my pursuits, over the next few years.
Historically speaking, many cultures have designed "stacking" sculptures to emphasize the influence and role of antagonistic physical forces in the natural world. This project naturally follows a similar route in concept. However, in the case of stacking sculptures, they are balanced from the bottom, top-wards, instead of the top, bottom-wards.
The stacking sculptures will also visually exaggerate the implications of potential and effectuality, as well as the testable properties of a physical force (or, a quantum force).
I predict that I will continue to experiment, and to celebrate this role of "potentiality" in our lives in many more different ways, through the ceramic material.
Index of Terms:
Abide Amulet Antagonistic Atmospheric Audit Bearing Conceptualize Counterweight Divine Effectuality Emphasize Ethereal Epoch Esteem Fabric of Space Gravity Hallowed Impermeable Initiative Medicine Bundle Medium NASA Orientation Pendulum Permeate Physics Pliable Potency Potentiality Predominantly Pressure Properties Protrusions Providence Quantum Quantum Physics Quantum Curvature of Space-Time Radical Rhetorician Sacrosanct Scale Space-Time Talisman
