The Building.
On a visit to a stately mansion in a small provincial town in Germany I was informed that Wagner had put the finishing touches to one of his operas within its walls. Many other eminent guests are known to have resided there in the last two hundred years. Much later, in the 20th century, it served as a retreat for high ranking officers who needed a brief respite from the ongoing conflagration in Europe. On at least one occasion during these two hundred years the Romanov sisters sojourned there for the summer. They wrote letters to their parents and took English lessons from an eccentric gentleman of questionable repute who was the source of much confounded amusement with the sisters. A fragment of a letter they might have written home would report how they ventured into the market place that day and purchased a fake beard to complete a Santa Claus outfit for the Christmas season. The letter could also mention a kitten that the sisters had grown rather attached to and were considering an appropriate name to give. Duska is mentioned as a possibility. However, in the same letter, the sisters also raise the concern that dear maman would find it rather vulgar to give a name to a cat. The letter is cut off abruptly in the middle of a sentence from one of their English lessons: duration of my chemical.
Copper
Promenades in the hills around the mansion brought me and my companions to entrances of decommissioned copper mines from an earlier age. Copper has always held a special attraction for me and I have made use of this soft and lissom metal in my work before. In light of the geographical epochs that the presence of copper invited us to consider, we realized that these hills are slowly but surely billowing across the landscape and threaten to eventually submerge the little hamlet where we were staying. Our villa stands on one of these hills that like some mad arboreal wave has already severely damaged the building standing next to it. The copper that once coiled through these hills in furtive veins is now contained within the walls of the villa in strict geometric configurations of electric wiring – a change that has occurred during the lifetime of the building that used to be lit with candle lights and gas lanterns. And during all this time, the cellar has harboured spiders that quietly bask in rumination on their fate in this grand sweep of time and the inevitable destruction that it brings. Spiders have blue blood because they rely on copper, rather than iron, to transport oxygen through the veins in their bodies.
Paper
A small stationery shop in the village carried limited supplies of artist materials. I made purchase of a single pan of watercolour and some paper. I was attracted to the watercolour for its name: fleischfarbe. I surrendered to a similar impulse in my choice of paper because it was a semi-transparent graph paper with a turquoise coloured grid but not at all suitable as a medium for the watercolour. Flesh colour and turquois grid. The warm lustrous hue that we associate with copper only occurs when it is oxidised on exposure to the elements. In its raw natural state copper has a tender pink colour. I went back to the mansion and proceeded to draw with the watercolour on the paper. Since the graph paper is not an appropriate medium for the watercolour it warped and pulled the images into contortions which I cut out to examine further. One of these biomorphic convolutions caught my fancy above the rest. I had made a little sculpture. This kind of migration across mediums has always appealed to me and I was happy to find myself sharing the space with this delicate little creature.
Photographs
One afternoon, a glutinous milky light flooded the building – penetrating at different angles through the small windows. It occurred to me that the previous inhabitants that had been presented to me through anecdotes and documentation must have witnessed the same spectacle during their stay. I took the paper sculpture around the building, setting it down in different places for a photograph on my way down from my room, down to the dance floor in the main hall and all the way outside to end in a stone horse trough for one last photograph before it came apart in the rainwater that had gathered there earlier in the day. The dazzling presence of light had prompted me to act without much consideration for understanding - because apart from reason, there must be other sources of authority to guide us, such as inclinations that do not pass through circuits of knowledge. The process must be allowed to breathe in accordance with its circumstances and not vanish into meaning. We can not always know. We can still act without knowing – reason, in her cunning, follows.
Words
I had another look at the words: duration of my chemical. I can not scan it like any regular sentence, the abrupt ending interrupts the reading and it keeps repeating itself without any conclusion. Meaning is left hanging in this semantic indeterminacy forever. The imagined letter from the Romanov sisters also passes through a gradient of verb tenses that undermines syntax and opens it up to ambiguity. Iridescent grammar allows meaning to float above the text and keep shifting there only slightly tethered to reality. Later, my companions directed my attention to the fact that, for each photograph, I seem to have placed the paper sculpture on borders, between light and shade.