COSMIC
DUST
Rudolf Steiner, Anita Groener, Martin
Healy, Brian King, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Ruth Lyons, Mark Cullen and Remco de
Fouw with George Melies film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)
Curated
by Emma-Lucy O’Brien
Visual
Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, 24 January – 17 May, 2015
We rarely get invited to consider the cosmos. With light pollution, sometimes we can barely
even see the stars. We are instead held
firmly earth-bound by celebrities, soap operas, and the very terrestrial events
of social media. Our cosmos too is monitored
and managed; cameras send back extraordinary images of galaxies and nebulas, our
nearest planetary neighbours are designated for not-too-distant future
colonisation and satellites flickering among the stars bring us our TV,
internet and phone calls. And yet to look into a night sky and see our
galaxy is still to wonder about our place in the Universe. Carlow Visual’s latest group exhibition, Cosmic Dust, launches with this
primordial mystery, interpreted, answered or represented by the works gathered
here by Emma-Lucy O’Brien.
As its theoretical starting point, Cosmic Dust uses Thomas
Browne’s book The Garden of Cyrus published
in 1658 in which Browne uses symbols, visions, natural imagery and his own
observations to try and explain the interconnectedness of art, nature and the
Universe. Interconnectedness is a very important theme
for this complex show and the works in it revolve around each other, transfer
concepts and energy between themselves, counteracting attempts at a linear
interpretation of the works and ideas.
On this cosmological tour, the blackboard drawings of
Rudolph Steiner are an appropriate place to begin. Steiner made these drawings between 1919 and 1924,
originally as visual accompaniments to his theories on ‘spiritual science’; a
philosophy to connect natural science and mysticism. The
drawings are in chalk on black paper - white, red and yellow in sweeping
circles and lines with arrows and annotations.
Some drawings show figures, all are energetic, so much so that in areas
that have been rubbed out and re-drawn, I look closely to see if any chalk dust
has fallen inside the frame. Reflected in the black paper though I see only
myself with the gallery space behind and the drawing superimposed on my
reflection. I have become a figure in
Steiner’s universe and this seems apt since there are few other figurative
works in this exhibition which seeks to define our place in the cosmos.
The mathematical school book-like doodles of Mark
Cullen also propose links between nature and science. These drawings are sharp in more than their
form consisting of lines drawn in various coloured pencils and pens, crossing
and joining to form circles, decagons, stars or three-dimensional structures
that spin away towards the gallery wall.
Cullen follows lines already drawn on the paper in faint pencil but then
adds in other lines or shading which destabilise the structure and seem to map
a personal as well as a physical space.
Cullen’s work concerns our position in the cosmos at a macro level in
terms of stars and planets and also at a micro level, in terms of energy
transference between bodies, and these multi-dimensional drawings interpret
both these ideas effectively, evoking both constellations and electrons,
meeting, colliding and continuing along expected or unexpected
trajectories.
There are white lines and white circles made from
lines in the painting and digital animation by Anita Groener. Groener’s concern is how we situate ourselves
in the world and the animation work, Somewhere
Else, suggests a constantly evolving cosmos, beginning with a flickering
black and white drawing of an armchair and transforming into two rotating
circles of chalk lines shimmering and moving towards and away from each
other. In the gap between the circles,
animals, figures, chairs and trees fall before eventually the circles, or
cells, themselves break down and all that is left is a dark sky with flashes of
stars. The earth is seen from space
until it shrinks and disappears; the moon rises and completes its cycle and
then there is only blackness but whether everything has ended or moved on or
back in time is impossible to know.
Remco de Fouw’s work, The Unchurning, might be a metaphor for the whole exhibition. Complex yet orderly to look at, it consists of
pieces of blackboard chalk several layers wide in a perfect circle. The ends of the chalk are circular too, but
displaced in space by the way the sticks fall or lean. Clearly linking to Steiner’s and Groener’swork,
there is yet an elemental response to this mysterious piece and its subtle
colour, patterns and texture transform into a desire to touch or to stamp round
the edges and feel the material crush underfoot. Suddenly this act of encirclement has
transfused arcane and enigmatic associations into this base material,
transporting the viewer from the classroom to the cosmos. There is the smell of the chalk and dust from
crushed pieces of chalk lies inside and outside the circle, a reminder that
this as the circle breaks down, the dust will be carried and redistributed around
the space by visitors and air currents like the aether which flows throughout
the cosmos in Martin Healy’s video piece of the same name.
Healy’s film depicts part of the life of Paul
Scheerbart, a German author, architect and artist, who, for two and a half
years in 1907, tried to invent a perpetual motion machine using the gravitational
pull of the earth. Scheerbart kept a
diary of his failure, published in 1910, and this forms the basis of the film
which begins and ends with the perpetual motion of the sea, and drifts, like
the aether of its title, through a recreation of Scheerbart’s laboratory, where
dust motes float above a globe and chalk dust falls from the blackboard as a
hand draws over and over the circle of the letter ‘g’. The film treats Scheerbart’s obsessive restlessness
tenderly but nothing in the film is still.
A patch of sunlight moves over a hillside, a man walks over rocks to the
sea and stops, holding a compass, the needle of which we know is quivering
towards North. A narrator talks of
aether as an ocean which flows throughout the cosmos and Healy’s film, not only
echoes but seems to continue Sheerbart’s search for this force - relevant now
in our own restless search for alternative energy sources.
Sea and salt lead to the sculptures of Ruth Lyons,
their forms and colours repeated in the seashore rocks seen in Aether.
Much of Lyons’ previous work has been concerned with the sea and its
materials such as The Pinking on Sea
(2014) , Glasimile (2010) and Pilot
Light Exchange where Lyons collaborated to produce lime from limestone,
itself formed from the bodies of long dead marine life. In this show Lyons has bowls carved from
industrially-mined rock salt from Co. Antrim.
The bowls are essentially raw, brown veined lumps of salt with shallow,
circular depressions. They might equally
have been created by water or wear over centuries, rather than the human hand
and their placement in the main gallery space is almost haphazard. Most are on high or low plinths and one is on
the floor as if forgotten about. I would
have preferred to see these singly throughout the exhibition; their impact is
lost as a group where their earthy quality is reduced by the repetition of so
many similar forms. Seen as individual
pieces their convex interiors suggest the negative space of domes and the
enclosing shapes resemble the eye or boat structures on some of the small
bronze sculptures by Brian King in the opposite corner of the gallery, reflecting
back too the female aspect , in opposition to the upthrusting masculinity of King’s
works.
In the Link Gallery, the 1902 silent film by George
Melies, La Voyage dans la Lune begins
(or ends) the exhibition. La Voyage dans la Lune is projected onto
the cement wall of the gallery, competing with light entering and partly disappearing
into the surface as it plays. Everything is white and when the astronauts land
on the face of the moon and fall asleep, they are awoken by snow falling like
chalk dust.
Like the moon in this film, Cosmic Dust creates a very accommodating atmosphere for
contemplation of the cosmos and our place in it. The contemporary environment of Visual Carlow
is suspended as the artists selected retreat to the past or to internal worlds
in order to provide their meaning as to our existence. This backward-looking, visionary view of the
cosmos encourages a loose, Romantic approach to the unknowable Universe. When we have all the answers at the touch of
a keypad, it is reassuring to be reminded that once there were things we did
not know. Cosmic Dust makes the viewer aware that wonder and mystery still
exist, that worlds and universes can still be created in the imagination and
expressed in salt and chalk. This is a
valuable consideration to take away from this exhibition and as I was driving
home, the sun was setting and there were white chalk lines in the centre of the
road nearly all the way home.
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