TEXT accompanying the installation NATURAL HISTORY in INTERMEDIA 2014.
NEEDLE/KNOT/RHYTHM BY R. WARWICK
NEEDLE
A giant thumb is pressing hard on your ass.
Your head feels intense pressure against skin which while soft, feels almost impossible to penetrate. An eye is wide yearning for the connection to be bound with something other than this intolerable intensity that is pushing through your rigid, glistening body.
At last the leather begins to give, stretching out at the point at which you are pushing till eventually [...!] you puncture though. Relief is instantaneous and you are pulled through to the other side as your eye momentarily slips into blackness.
Now pulled upwards you are running... flowing...flying... liberated up, up, UP!
Your rise seems free but is not.
An abrupt halt to your liberation feels at first abstract and distant, either somewhere in the future or very far back before memory. Again, you feel overwhelmed by some invisible force so driven by purpose that helplessly, you at once both acquiesce and resist.
Intense pressure builds in the very tip of your head, a giant thumb is pressing hard on your ass..
THE WORLD IS BOUND WITH SECRET KNOTS
Find an object to use as and anchor
Begin tying your knot
Pull the length of the cords through the loop
Pull gently to snug the knot down
Bend the tight-handed cord over the left-hand cord
Reverse the above (like tying your shoe laces)
Snug the knot
Repeat until desired length
‘All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated worlds within worlds within worlds:
the seen and the unseen
the physical and the immaterial are all connected
each exerting influence on the next
bound, as it were, by chains of analogy
magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.’
- Valentine Worth, c.1800’s
If you’re ever in Los Angeles, The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City is where to go soon after arrival in the city. It is a museological anomaly, a specialised repository of relics and artefacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. Halldórsdóttir visited there in April 2012 when she was profoundly affected by its idiosyncratic atmosphere and seemingly contradictory system of classifications. Within the darkened rooms, spot-lighting picks out compelling curios which point to mysteries unique to human endeavour. Within this collection resides research on a compelling figure. A Seventeenth Century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher; Inventor, composer, geographer, geologist, Egyptologist, historian, adventurer, philosopher, proprietor of one of the first public museums, physicist, mathematician, naturalist, astronomer, archaeologist, author of more than 40 published works, Kircher in his spare time also dedicated himself to his parallel obsessions with magnetism, musicology, astronomy, archaeology, and linguistics, he researched and compiled enormous amounts of data, invented innumerable optical, magnetic, and acoustic devices, composed music, poetry, and imaginative fiction. In this instance however, it is his intuitive philosophical understanding of the interdependency of all things that is pertinent to understanding the work of Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir. Aside from his expansive mind, Kircher was not bound to books within the confines of his study, he was instead immersed in the world that so fascinated him. Surviving numerous brushes with death, the most potent example is his last and greatest escapade was on a trip through southern Italy, Sicily, and Malta. It was in Italy that Kircher witnessed the eruption of Aetna and Stromboli, and driven by the elemental desire to understand what was happening, he had himself lowered into the active crater at Vesuvius. At this time a new phase of eruptions from Vesuvius marked this a dangerous time in volcanic history, including a major eruption in the mid-1600’s that buried many villages under lava flows, killing around 3,000 people. Torrents of boiling water were also ejected, adding to the devastation. Activity thereafter became almost continuous till the beginning of the 1700’s.
So, it is here in this dark space that we contemplate what it is to be lowered into an active volcano.
RHYTHM
Cocooned in the deepest black she is bowed over, a great mass of hair spills onto the floor almost indistinguishable from the looms of black waxed thread unravelled at her feet.
Slowly, an elbow rises and falls. White fingers probe, her needle a glint of sliver is the only light in the room. To her right she has something resembling a shrine consisting of;
Ampoules of volcanic ash and sand
Charred ingots of wood
Great shards of the darkest obsidian, jet and prismatic jags of hematite
An image of a skull at the northerly tip of black pentagram flanked against a wall
A skull mug used as a container for pencils and pens
A handmade ball made of stretched leather the size of a human head
Giant scissors
Long bobbed pins
Needles, all sizes
Swathes of the softest leather
A smallish cluster of golden bells
Candles, curled and low.
Propped at the apex, a print that at first glance looks like a Max Ernst turns out to be the dystopic landscape of Moominvalley by Tove Jansson. This realisation is simultaneously delightful as it is darkly uncanny. Although a place of calm; of slopes and rivers and fruit trees, Moominvalley is continually threatened by natural forces, of volcanoes and great floods. It has also, a dark melancholic counterpart that exists in another world, a place of boredom and repetition - its stark landscape is punctuated with terrifying shards of rock and is so vast that progression through it is necessitated by the use of long teetering stilts (no doubt a solitary and potentially dangerous mode of travel). This is world she recognises, where the most elemental forces of nature preside over the phrenic and rational claustrophobia of lives lived today. This image and the venerated arrangements of her dark matter coalesce into an atmosphere born in prehistory, a space so unfathomably far away both in time and rational thought. Yet, this liminal line between ritual and sculpture, time and atmosphere is where she makes, communes with her material and ultimately vanishes.
But for now at least she pierces and pulls, pierces and pull pierces and pulls. Then turns a record over. For hours, days, months she pierces and pulls and turns the record over.
R. Warwick, October 2014
Rhona Warwick is a writer and researcher based in Glasgow where she was trained in the dark arts of Sculpture. Past publications include; Garth Evans: Beneath The Skin. 2013, Nicky Bird Beneath the Surface/ Hidden Place. 2010, Arcade: Artists and Place-making 2006.
