“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, September 1, 2012

Marian Crawford, ASLEC-ANZ (Liveblog)

“Earthlings.”

Coral islands.

Prints: an ambiguous relationship with origin. Matrix and impressions. Interested in incorporating the entire edition into one single larger work. (Like Merleau-Ponty!—he added.)

Bees are unique individuals who when massing together form an identity, a swarm.

Gestalt. A specific whole formed in such a way that no part expresses it.

Each iteration of the image is an echo. It reminds of otherness, distance from origin. We ask ourselves these questions when we look wistfully back to the pristine.

3 works: Black Sun, Carbon Copies and Earthlings.

Black Sun (2010) made of gouache stained etchings. Cotton threads join the circular images. A loose pillar of threads about 2 meters in diameter.

Julia Kristeva. “From which galaxy does this black sun come?”

Images on circles are endangered plants. Print making has a role in the discovery of species.

Carbon Copy (2011). An essential part of life on earth is C. Can be stored up to several hundred years in trees.

Plates made that look like flocks of leaf litter: multiple, generic and specific. Derrida's arguments about the law of friendship and mourning. One friend must die first. Fidelity is mourning—interiorizing the other, that it can only be in us, and this is never completed. It remains in the end imposible. We can never and never could we wish to fully interiorize.

We can interiorize as perfect and ideal; or remaining in the state of impossible mourning. Infinite distance. With each death there is an end of the world (Derrida).

Print processes <> Derrida's suggestion regarding the impossible and constant reorganization of space.

The ambiguity of origins. Engagement with systemic flux.

Earthlings. Merleau-Ponty, “We are all earthlings.”
Jellyfish at Melbourne Aquarium.
Intaglio prints of photographs of them. Dark frieze of all the parts, a thin line, containing lines that are similar yet different. Individual but not unique jellyfish (to our eyes). An optical trick--a slit or gap. Images as galactic.

We will never experience the jellyfish world, they will remain strange. It might change our anxiety to know this.

In all these works, I explore the possible equivalence and melancholy relationship with the natural world.  The gulf of mourning.

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