Susanna Castleden

The Weight of a Hole

Susanna Castleden

The weight of feathers I must have been quite young when I first encountered the question of what was heavier, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of lead. The trick question was successfully navigated, but in answering it, an image evolved that has stayed with me. I conjured up two very different pictures. One was a scrap metal yard, seen from a slightly elevated angle, with a block of lead – smaller than a car, bigger than a shoebox – firmly plunked on a set of industrial scales that confirmed the weight of a tonne. By contrast, the feathers, that were much less easy to contain, proved problematic, because in my mind I was worried that if they were contained in, say, a hessian sack, it would add to the tonne, and therefore give an incorrect weight (clearly overthinking the original question). So, I had to imagine a way that the unruly tonne of feathers could be weighed but not contained. I pictured a room full entirely of white feathers, and I invented a pressure-pad-type floor that became the device which in turn weighed out the tonne. It was a wondrously paradoxical heavy/light, feather-filled gallery space, that I can still clearly picture in my mind today.

Keeping things in your head is good to a point – imagining what it might look like, what it might feel like – but that can only go as far as your mind knows. I guess Martin Creed’s galleries half-full of coloured inflated balloons (Work No. 200 Half the air in any given space, 1998), and Antony Gormley’s rooms full of fog (Blind Light, 2007) would have started like that, in the head.

The weight of paper The weight of paper is measured in gsm – grams per square metre. Imagine a square metre of paper on a set of scales. The floppiness of thinner paper allows it to sneak away from the surface of the scale, a bit like the feathers escaping capture, making its gsm smaller and smaller by virtue of its thinness and suppleness. Heavier paper, like almost-card-paper, held firm by its own thickness of strength, would obligingly stay perfectly horizontal allowing for the fullness of its weight to be collected on the scale. All eight-hundred-and-fiftygrams-per-square-metre of it.

A hole in a piece of 300gsm paper also holds its form, contained and secure in a circumference of woven cotton fibres. Arches paper, thick and heavy, (and still made in a mill in France), has deckled edges that support the holes in worn and warm parallel lines. Deckled edges have the quality of a winter shadow, furry and muted. The burned holes burrow into the paper, nudge, and sometimes break the shadowy edges. The holes have a soft, heavy weight. The weight of a hole.

What happens to the weight of paper when half of it becomes a hole? What would the scale say now? Does the weight of the hole correlate to the weight of the paper? Is a hole in steel heavier than a hole in paper? What is heavier, a tonne of holes, or a tonne of holes tied together with string?

The weight of custard Lindy Lee tells a story of her first experiments pouring molten lead into water, where unsatisfactorily the liquid metal fell too fast, leaving shapes that, instead of being interesting, were bottom-of-the-pot blobs. The desire for greater viscosity prompted further experiments, seeking a stickier, gluier liquid to support and stall the weight of lead as it fell. Custard was the solution. It allowed the cool thickness to slow the transformation of liquid to solid. What is heavier, a tonne of custard or a tonne of lead?

Flame from the Dragon’s Pearl: Open as the Sky, 2013, mirror polished bronze, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore, © the artist

We spent a New Year’s Eve in Austria when I was about 16, with my Austrian aunt who drew us into stories and customs of her own teenage years. At midnight, in the deep snow outside our shack in the mountains, where it was so cold our snot and tears turned into ice, we melted lead. The tradition of Bleigiessen involved pouring the liquid metal into an old saucepan of freezing water and then reading the shapes that formed as a portent to the year ahead. They all seemed to look the same, like misshapen fishing sinkers. If only we’d had custard.

The weight of oil Richard Wilson half-filled a gallery space with engine oil in his artwork 20:50 (1991 - 2017). It was black, pitch black, sticky, viscous, and reflected and mirrored the gallery architecture in its liquid surface. You felt immersed in it, by virtue of the narrow corridor viewing platform, and up close could see small flecks of dust trapped in the molasses-like viscosity. The surface tension where the oil met the edge of the viewing platform created an alluring meniscus, like the edge of polished poured molten metal, or of a dew drop.

The fundamental principle of lithography, a type of printmaking, is that oil and water don’t mix. A waxy crayon is used to draw on a porous stone, which is then flooded with water. An oil-based ink is rolled over

the wet stone, where it is repelled by the water, but adheres to the waxy crayon, from which a print is made. It’s an oily mirror-image of the drawing on the stone. Hessian put through a photocopier on the other hand, is neither mirrored nor inky, but instead, half the image is printed on holes. A print on a hole.

The weight of rain The curiosity of viscosity that drove the custard / water question could be extended to ink. To discuss the viscosity of ink (and the blackness of black), is a particular printmaking thing, but like the fall of the lead, the thickness of ink will determine if it falls or sits on a surface in a particular way. Too runny and it seeps, too rigid and it fails to transfer to the paper. You can read this in a printmaking manual but can only know it by experiencing the matter of ink. I want to imagine what would be the difference between less viscous ink flung on heavy gsm paper, left in the rain, and more viscous ink flung on lighter gsm paper, left in the rain. And what if the ink was oily, and what if the holes were burned or cut, and the rain heavy or light. Would the ink pull or pool?

The weight of a ladle Handed the molten bronze in a ladle, the huge weight of it choreographs the fall of the metal. Lindy demonstrates this in the lecture theatre, stance wide, feet firmly planted. Her hips and waist are the fulcrum that mediates the imaginary weight of the metal and directs the energy of the imaginary toss. She speaks about not being able to manufacture the fall of the fluid bronze and I wonder if there’s variation in the viscosity of molten bronze. It’s not a printmaker thing, that.

An etching plate (another type of print thing) can be copper, or steel, or zinc. All are buffed, polished, and the edges are perfectly bevelled before an image is applied. They are often so beautiful that it’s difficult to imagine anything on them other than a reflection.

The weight of a dew drop The precariousness of dew drops on the lupin leaves this morning when we walked through the field was evidenced by the position of the lupin plant itself. If nestled near a tree in the long winter

solstice shadows, the drop holds fast in its windless shadowy space, but if positioned beyond the shadows and touched by the sleepy northern rays, it disappears. The form of the leaf holds the dew, to a point, but like the paper on scales, must hold the weight of itself, and now a dewdrop too. I wonder if the weight of each individual dew drop varies because of the gsm of the leaf on which it forms.

It turns out the weight of a feather pillow is measured in grams per square metre, and a square metre of lead (9cm thick) weighs a tonne.

The weight of a hole remains elusive.

Author’s note This piece is about matter, and the stuff of making art. It started with the title, the weight of a hole, and draws from my intimate knowledge of working with paper in my own art practice. Paper is central to most of my work, and over the years I have become attentive to what it can do – I cover it in gesso, soak it, sand it, rub it, buff it, scrunch it. When working in the field – at wind farms, airplane boneyards and shipping ports – it becomes bruised by the wind, faded by the sun, and marked by the rain. Seeing Lindy Lee’s paper works in conversation with her poured metal pieces and photocopied prints prompted a piece of writing that drew these elements together to bounce off (and layer upon) one another.

Susanna Castleden is Dean of Research in the Faculty of Humanities. She completed her creative practice PhD in the School of Art at RMIT titled Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna’s artworks are included in many public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of WA, Curtin University, ArtBank, Bankwest, Royal Perth Hospital, Cruthers Collection, Kerry Stokes Collection and the City of Fremantle. With a background in printmaking, Susanna is interested in developing experimental processes associated with image transference and reproduction. Her current research focusses on travel mobility and energy production, with specific reference to the sites and objects of movement and transition.