The Power of Things
May Hands
May Hands
It
is instinctive to be curious and to collect. Into a container we place our
selected fragments of the world, given an opportunity to curate our personal
space and minds. The early technologies of spinning and vessel making being
combined led to the making of nets (believed to have been knotted similar to
macramé) to catch food and hold belongings as humans travelled from one place to
another. Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), considers the humble container and
suggests it was one of the earliest inventions and cultural devices. She
discusses how the container is the tool that brought energy home, providing
warmth, food, shelter and comfort as well as materials for creativity. ‘It is a
human thing to do put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or
beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net
woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home
being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then
later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a
solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum,
the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you
probably do much the same again - if to do that is human, if that’s what it
takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly for the first
time.’ (https://www.academia.edu/17313163/The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction_-_Ursula_K._Le_Guin).
What is a Vessel?
A home
A
convenience
An
organisation
An
arrangement
A store
A place
to hide
A place
to be held
A life
An
incubator
A
decoration
An
indentation
A mould
A
solution
A
protection
A
transportation
A
souvenir
A memory
A place
A space
A tool
What is an Ingredient?
A
substance
An object
A feeling
A
fragment
A piece
A whole
in itself
A
temperature
A liquid/
gas/ solid
A part
A
leftover
A
commodity
A word
A flavour
A texture
A colour
A
material
A prayer
A thought
A sound
A gift
Material
holds such value. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) recognises
value in all materials, objects and beings, through their vibrancy and
vitality. Bennett presents a passage from Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands(1998), where he notices the vitality of a garbage hill as it decomposes and
oozes pollution, Bennett writes, ‘Sullivan reminds us that a vital materiality
can never really be thrown ‘‘away’’, for it continues its activities even as a
discarded or unwanted commodity’. (Bennett, 2010, pg. 6). Leftovers and
undesired items become ‘rubbish’, though this is not the end of their existence
and vitality. By decomposing they change states and carry on their continuation
of being. This vibrancy and energy exist within all things, Bennett describes
it as ‘Thing-Power’, ‘Thing-Power:
the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects
dramatic and subtle’. (Bennett, 2010, pg. 6).
Through
‘Thing Power’ we are consciously and sub-consciously attracted to gather things
from the world around us and make technologies, shelters, art etc. We are able
to recognise the power in objects and material, the possibilities and
opportunities they gift us. Our various environments provide materials and
situations to adapt to and live with/within - a seeking of harmony and
survival. In his essay, Making Culture and Weaving the World (2000), Tim
Ingold writes, ‘...making should be regarded as a way of weaving, and not vice
versa… the forms of objects are not imposed from above but grow from the mutual
involvement of people and materials in an environment.’ (Ingold, 2000,
pg.65-68).
This
mutual involvement, a purposeful collaboration between material, human or
animal and environment results in the act of making; a biological compulsion. It
is what creates culture, traditions and technologies.
Robin Wall
Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
invites us to speak the grammar of animacy, to see all living things as
animate, an idea that is deeply rooted in indigenous philosophy and language.
‘To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in
a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a
mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all
things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.’ (Kimmerer, 2013, pg. 55). By
recognising and respecting the aliveness that vibrates within everything
(‘thing-power’) no longer would we undervalue and toss aside what we label as
‘things’ or ‘it’. Both Kimmerer and Le Guin suggest we treat all living things
as ‘kinfolk’ and refer to them as ‘kin’.
Kimmerer speaks in
depth about the indigenous knowing that all living things are in service and
gifts to one another; the earth is an ecosystem of gift giving. She writes,
‘The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The
currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking,
private land is understood to be a ‘‘bundle of rights’’, whereas in a gift
economy property has a ‘‘bundle of responsibilities’’ attached.’ (Kimmerer,
2013, pg. 28).
Reflections on flower potions and sandcastle
cakes
As
a child when visiting my grandparents’, I made up my own recipes for potions with
the readily available materials I could find in their garden. These were mostly
herbs, flowers and grass, with added rainwater that had been collected in a green
plastic watering can. I would combine everything together into one of my Grandma’s
ceramic pots and mix it all together with a stick or a feather, adding in
wishes and words, then grind, stir and let steep. Fragrances of sage, lavender
and rosemary emerged and bright pops of rose petals floated to the surface of
my brew. I was ‘cooking’ alfresco, feeding the fairies and insects that lived
in the garden. Child’s play, gathering a sense of things and gaining knowledge
of the available ingredients that grew in a suburban English garden. Children
find ways to copy what ‘grown-ups’ do through play. These are typically daily essential
tasks, which though basic and routine for the adult, can be mimicked by a child
as an form of play and ritual.
As
a child, in the local play park you would find me in the sandpit making
sandcastle cakes - hand-formed mounds of damp sand with twigs, leaves, lolly
pop sticks and daisies adorning the tops. These were reminiscent of my Grandma’s
famous ‘clarty cakes’ she has told me so much about; of similar form only
constructed with clay and mud (‘clarty’ is northern English dialect for sticky
and muddy). A couple of years ago I remembered these sandcastle cakes and the clarty
cakes and found myself back in my Grandma’s garden asking the wet earth beneath
my feet it’s permission to take some of it. I began with a prayer for the land
and gave my gratitude, slowly I dug into the clay rich earth. With the weight
of my body and a careful stamp of my feet, in a blue tarp Ikea bag I mixed the
clay with added barley straw and sand to make cob. I then assembled cob
sculptures, packing the sticky, solid material and additional natural
ingredients (including grasses, seeds, flower petals and herbs) into bags to record
and trace the space within those containers.
Since
making this series of works and exhibiting them in various exhibitions I have
returned them to the site where I received the clay. ‘Thing-power’ is very much
alive, within the wind, rain and frost and in the sculptures themselves, the
compact forms softening and decomposing in shape and arrangement, returning
back into the body of the earth.
Bibliography:
Bennett, Jane
2010: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things, USA, Duke University Press
Kimmerer, Robin.
W. 2013: Braiding Sweetgrass,
Minneapolis, MN, Milkweed Editions
Tim Ingold essay
from:
Graves-Brown 2000:
Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, London and New York, Routledge
Lange-Berndt, Petra et
al., 2015: Materiality, London, Whitechapel Gallery
Le Guin, Ursula. K
1986: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’,
from ‘Dancing at the Edge of the World
https://www.academia.edu/17313163/The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction_-_Ursula_K._Le_Guin]
May Hands
Vessel IV (Dahlia/Net)
2020
H: 7cm L: 29cm W: 23cm
Fired black crank clay, glaze and transfers
May Hands
Buy Me & Become Me (LV)
2019
Clay and soil aggregate, sage,
lavender, rose and fennel seed
