IMPERMANENCE IN PRACTICE

An important aim for this research was to achieve better understanding of impermanence as a means of creative expression, particularly relating to clay, and the practice-led nature of the programme offered an opportunity to use personal practice as a resource and testing ground.

While my personal focus does not stem from a western religious sense of the impermanence of life, followed by the permanence of an after-life, there is a spiritual dimension to the motivation for working in this way (for instance, with

102

Impermanence expresses our experience of the finite world of birth and death, and is founded on the bedrock of one formulation of the three Buddhist statements concerning the nature of that world: (1) all is impermanent, (2) all is suffering, and (3) all is without ego or self. Everything is impermanent.

Stambaugh, 1990, pp.1-2 Reflecting on practice over the research period, meditational qualities are stimulated by psychological withdrawal (a feature of both my making and my installation processes) rather than location, being apparent in work I have made in both West and East.

The interest in valuing impermanence appears to have deep psychological meaning in Western and Eastern thought alike. Freud states:

I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.

On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. Freud (1915)

He remarks on the importance of transience, the value of transient things and the dual responses of denial and fight in the face of impermanence. The tension he describes is personally very familiar, given concepts of self and other, of time passing and the irretrievability of what is gone.

Two works illustrate the temporal range which can be encompassed in an exploration of impermanence, both also illustrating another feature of impermanence which the research has identified as important, i.e.

unrepeatability. There is a perceptible difference between unrepeatable work (e.g. Return to Koshi) and that which can be resuscitated in some way (for instance, two of Cushway’s raw pieces: ‘In terms of Snowdon, which is the unfired cast of the top of Snowdon, that still lives in the garage. The Earth piece, which is a similar thing made out of clay… I know that I can remake them if I need to ever… I don’t see them as impermanent really.’ Cushway. Interview 10.11.11. See Appendix 5)

103

Tidal Transience (Figure 4.8) was planned and executed as an

environmental installation to last briefly, in this instance less than a tidal cycle.

The work involved keel forms from Tsunami (see 1.2.2, pp.14-17, and Figure 1.3) and the action of the sea. I intended it solely as an installation work of limited duration in which I experimented with the notion of an unrecorded event, an aspect of impermanent work which was to become a key research focus, as discussed in Chapter 8. Consequently, I experienced both practical and emotional consequences of a lack of physical documentation of

impermanent work, while an invited audience enabled me to identify issues, both as artist and audience member, regarding witness, participation,

performance and memory, which stimulated personal reflection. In the event, and on further reflection, this was a very liberating way of working, due to the unpredictable nature of the evidence of the work of which I, as the instigator, am aware.

Figure 4.8 Sarah Gee Tidal Transience. Dimensions variable. High tideline, Hartlepool Headland. 20.09.09 (one of several elements). Image © M. J. Gee

It performed a cathartic act for me, in releasing the whole issue of tsunami damage to the sea – back to its origin, albeit half a world away from where it

104

had occurred. I walked the tideline close to my home immediately prior to high tide placing keels to be overwhelmed by water, before invited witnesses. The entire focus for the work was the rapid loss of the physicality of the high- fired pieces (I had not at this stage in my research appreciated Tidal

Transience’s performance aspect). It was a deliberate decision to take no

photographs, thus exploring the impact of lack of evidence, but witnesses (who included passers-by) were not prevented from doing so. While field- testing occurred over several days, the work took less than thirty minutes for the keels to wash away, become embedded in the sand, or break up (see Appendix 1.ii). The rapidity of the impermanence wrought by tidal action on pieces, which had personal meaning was crucial to this work. Being a site- sensitive and live event, it cannot be recreated.

ReCollection (first installed 2011, still in situ at the time of writing. See

Appendix 1.iii) was an environmental installation exploring memory, care and respect. My aims in making this installation were to utilise self as case study material to experiment with subject matter (testing whether work with

ceramics involving other than socio-political commentary is effective using an impermanent mode of expression, compared with Losing It, Return to Koshi and Sanbao Respect), material and process (identifying the importance of both) and siting: to compare issues both of public exhibition in an institutional setting with those of open-air installation work anticipated to be of very short duration (such as Tidal Transience) and of site-sensitivity as opposed to site- specific work (e.g. Koshi and Nag Puja).

The materials used were personally symbolic, the fired ceramic having been devised for a personally important degree show piece (see Figure 1.5) while the organic content of bone china connotes mortality. Laying out shrouded body forms in orderly fashion (see Figure 9.2a/b) mitigated the random, disrespectful dumping that the new-born infants experienced at Yewden Roman villa (for information about the excavation and analysis see

http://www.chilternarchaeology.com/hambleden.htm). The materials and

forms, deliberately selected for their fragility, were laid out in rows on a bed of pebbles. Weather and human footfall allowed the pebble matrix to absorb these ‘bodies’ gently, over time. The impermanence here related more to

105

alteration and integration into an eco-system than to destruction. Modification by weathering was anticipated, but colonisation of elements by moss was not, adding an appropriate piquancy to the work.

This work’s persistence (see Definitions and Clarifications p. xiv for this term) was not anticipated at the outset, being the result of adoption and curation by staff of what was planned as a temporary installation. (This adoptive type of intervention was an unanticipated aspect of impermanent work at the earliest stages of the research programme, but became more significant, for instance in RePlace; see 5.2, pp.117-118, and Appendix 1.i).

An important outcome of exploring the context for personal praxis was

confirmation that impermanence is significant also in the way the work of other makers is received, and that impermanence has a long pre-history of

importance in understanding our world. As Whiteread (2012) notes regarding transient installation art remaining in the memory: ‘A lot of the work has been temporary. Probably the most powerful thing about House is that it doesn’t exist any more’. Freud would no doubt have derived psychological meaning from commentary on both my works and Whiteread’s remark.

The ways in which impermanent art is received in general indicate that it intrigues and challenges critic and public alike and, as indicated in Chapter 1, my research motivation initially was to understand the context for my

intuitively creative work with impermanence and to explore the meanings and motives for others working in a similar way.