- At what point in the creative process does a lump of clay become form (I have used 'a form' in the past, from the Germanic een vorm/ein Form), when does formless become form?
The French philosopher Georges Bataille spoke of l'informe
http://aphelis.net/georges-bataille-linforme-formless-1929/
and some further explorations of this concept provide a more concrete illustration
http://radicalart.info/informe/index.html
The list of words designating forms of formlessness includes nouns that appropriately define what is depicted in the first two/three images below - and perhaps, to some, in the last two images.
Formless?
Formless / form?
Form?
Form is arising from formless as 'recognisable' structures/patterns emerge. And what are these 'recognisable' structures/patterns? I wonder - and I will expand on this further in a subsequent post - whether it has primordially to do with universal geometry (this hasn't quite fully jelled in my mind yet).
And now for an explanation of my work process for my initial Gutai-inspired work:
As I've said before, what inspired me about the Gutai approach was (and very much/increasingly continues to be) the idea of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life; finding a way to confront and unite with the material, with one's own spiritual dynamics; combining human creative ability with the characteristics of the material; bringing the material to life; working with the material in a way that is completely appropriate to it; the artist serving the material - the artist's 'ego' is not or minimally visible (not giving one's work titles or provide interpretations) which allows for the material and the creative process to be the main elements in creation, the artist is secondary to that.; and finally embracing the beauty of the process, both the work process and the process of material and artistic ageing, of decay ultimately.
With this in mind I set about working with very wet clay - ideally it would have been the condition in which it comes from the quarry - manipulating, handling, moving the clay to let it take 'form'. The idea was to continue to do this until something 'interesting' (recognisable) happened - a movement, a plane, a concave.
Initially I threw small handfuls of clay onto a board. This produced 'smudges', all pretty similar. I then began taking larger handfuls and placed these less forcefully onto the board - reducing the intervention/impact from the artist - but still nothing much was really happening.
The next step was to saturate the clay with water to achieve a very loose but still holding consistency and I set about kneading it, moving it around, throwing it, dropping it from a height, swirling it, ... and here I felt I was beginning to really connect with the material. I had never 'felt' the clay as profoundly as that before, !in all the years I've worked with clay! I basked in the physicality of moving such a large mass around - physically quite demanding. The sound of the wet clay being moved by my hands. The texture, the smell, the sound, the physical resistance, the physical interaction ... what a joy!
The wetter the clay - of course - the more formless the clay and the more it obeys the laws of gravity - something else to work with.
I woke the following morning with the thought that my 'interference', my manipulating of the clay, should be kept to a minimum in order to let the clay live; let the clay do the creating and I simply initiate/facilitate - the artist serves the material.
I feel I need to point out that the initial intention was to use these wet-clay forms as 'foundation forms' from which to make 'a scultpure', and, as I recorded in my sketchbook, 'to find the interesting elements and use those as the basis for my form'. I saw them as 'the seed from which the sculpture would grow'. This dovetailed with my earlier exploration of what goes on underneath/behind [the positive/negative, which culminated in the piece entitled 'Abstract IV' as per my post of 30 March 2011]). I removed these 'interesting elements' and encased them in plaster. The discovery of the joy of exploring plaster as a material then took over, the evolution of which I shall describe in a subsequent post.
Ten months or so on, the evolution along the path of Gutai-inspired discovery has been such that I intend to revisit the wet-clay manipulations but retain them in their integrity. They will be the 'sculptures'.
