#trace of existence

[doranedwards]

Installation sketch Installation sketch

Perhaps two hundred hanging strips of delicate, translucent paper with 16 pairs of strips with surface transducers and contact mics each to create a feedback loop when they touch. Each row of the ten will be made up of two large sheets of paper that will, before separating, each have a complete image on them.

The image will be a visual interpretation of my experience of listening to the voices recorded in a workshop I will run on group toning. Each row’s 2D image will contribute to a 3D image so as to form a circle to continue a non-lingual sensuous dialogue that exists continuously in-between. 

Translucency is important with this work and allows for the potential reading of what is seen as something faint and passing, like memory. This is done so beautifully in the fine silk and needles of Doris Salcedo’s Disremembered, 2014 and Mira Scendel’s Monotype’s where the use of fine Japanese paper and an adaptation of monotype printing allowed for a double sided image. This double sided quality is essential in not creating a front facing object, as suggested by Ingrid Plum, so visitors can move around the sculpture to see and hear its spatiality. Schendel’s technique is something I would like to try. 

[doranedwards]

Mira Schendel Monotype series

Schendel was given a stack of fine Japanese rice paper that was too delicate to be drawn on or take any kind of water based paint and so, after meeting a woman who’s practice inspired her, began to experiment with monotype techniques. By adding a base coat of black oil paint to a sheet of glass and then covering it with a layer of talc, she was able to lay the paper on top and draw on it. As the oil paint seeped through, the moment was recorded. 

‘The Monotipias initiated what the artist would later call the ‘problematic of transparency’ in her production. If one is able to perceive her interest in the relationship between opacity and translucency in the early paintings and gouaches of the 1950s, in which the contrast between light and dark, between fields of sparse and dense matter, was explored through asymmetrical geometric compositions, it was with these drawings that Mira would dress the issue of ground zero: in the specific physicality of Japanese paper she found fertile ground to experience the potency of ‘invisible visibility’. 

This ‘invisible visibility’ is important in the articulation of my own themes of the trace of voice. It is like capturing the condensation on the glass that obscures the view to the street from the warmth of bodies inside a warm cafe on a cold day in December. Voice energy remains in the body, even after the sound has dissipated. As the people leave the cafe, the trace of their existence remains on the glass, slowly evaporating like a fading memory. 

[W]ith a fingernail or sharp object she would ‘draw’: the trace materialized between the slightest friction between the body, the paper and the ink, in contract to the direct intentionality of drawing with graphite on paper. The delicacy of Japanese paper allowed the mark to be ‘recorded’ instantly on both sides, without the need of a press. This crossing of lines is critical to understanding how the artist discovered, through these oil drawings, which is key to the understanding of her poetics; namely that the process of ‘making visible’ is closely related to the thinness, no matter how subtle, of the matter.’ 

(Taisa Palhares, Mira Schendel: Monotypes. 2015,  Pp. 419-421)

I will explore the monotype printing technique using the same method as Schendel to allow the trace of voice energy to take its own development. 

[doranedwardsmajorproject]

Tanchu - Many applications and cultural transcendence of Zen brushwork

‘The person who can brush one stroke that is truly “alive” will find it has many applications. It can be used in calligraphy or, perhaps, for an image of an orchid [...] Although someone with an eye for art may have a slight advantage, Zen brushwork, like painting, transcends culture. It can be appreciated and practiced by anyone with a desire to approach it. Begin by brushing the Zen line and simple shapes. and with time you will capture the spirit of your subject.’ (Tanshu, Zen Brushwork)

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Tanchu - Line

‘A line that manifests clarity cannot be drawn if the heart is clouded by worldly concerns; a stroke cannot be brushed with resolution if the heart is agitated; and calligraphy that reveals depth cannot be produced if cultivation and experience are shallow.’ Tanshu, Zen Brushwork. p. 10

[doranedwardsmajorproject]

Line traces our existence, voice is a trace of breath

Developing my own theme of traces, Stephen Connor offers a theory of voice as a strain;

‘What is a voice? It is a straining of the air […]

The breath is drawn as a bow is drawn, by applying a force against the resistance of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles. The power of the voice is the release of the kinetic energy stored in these muscles as they return to their resting positions. But the voice’s energy is not simply given out. For there to be voice, there must be a secondary resistance, the impedance or thwarting of this outflow. Where the breath simply escapes, there can be no voice.’

(Stephen Connor, Strains of Voice. Phonorama: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Stimme als Medium, ed. Brigitte Felderer (Berlin: Matthes and Seitz, 2004), pp. 158-72)

To develop the voice as a trace of breath, first I want to make a comparison to the drawn line. For Time Ingold it is not, like  drawn line is not gestural strain in a kind of arm wrestle with its own interior and exterior material reality, but instead a path that is traced ‘not from an image in the mind of a maker to its expression in the material world but orthogonally, looping in and out between mind and paper, rather as a swimmer dives into the water and comes back up for air (Berger, 2005 p.125, in Ingold, 2011 p. 217-8).

I feel the the voice is more of a tracing of the breath that, one it is given out, cannot be retrieved. Like Noriko’s description of the brush line, it is a trace of our existence.

[doranedwardsmajorproject]

Line is a trace of our existence - Zen Brushwork workshop 08.01.20

In this session, the teacher Noriko said something that grounded me into the purpose of this practice and also led me to make several connections;

‘When we let go of ourselves through the breath, brush and ink, we trace our existence in that moment’

The tracing of existence through drawn line is significant. In the Zen Brushwork setting, it documents your state of mind and body in that moment, every hesitation, frustration, intention is made visible. After the session we have a moment to reflect on our brushwork, which, if one so wishes to do so, is an enriching opportunity to learn about oneself.

Similarly, the voice is a trace of breath as it renders the air never to be retracted.

[doranedwardsmajorproject]

Traces of existence

Condensation 

traces a memory

of bodies no longer

there

Condensation obscures the view to the street from the warmth of bodies inside a warm cafe on a cold day in December. Voice energy remains in the body, even after the sound has dissipated. As the people leave the cafe, the trace of their existence remains on the glass, slowly evaporating like a fading memory.

[doranedwardsmajorproject]

Qiu Zhijie, Writing the “Orchid Pavillion Preface” One Thousand Times (1990-5)

‘By writing the same text repeatedly, Qiu not only focused on the process of writing but also eliminated “the literary nature of calligraphy” and asserted the ultimate goal of calligraphic practice “as a form of ‘written meditation.’”’