Material as Witness

MATERIAL AS WITNESS

The Earth is saturated with history.

Nature is a witness to the actions, just or evil, of humanity.

Nature outlives human memory.

The trees, the soil, the grass are observant creatures.

Our natural brothers and sisters are a record waiting to be read.

Essential to developing a process to commemorate a memory in places, is to slow down and listen to the place. It is the position of this research that listening is best done through establishing a connection between material and the body. Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the GSD, Yukio Lippit wrote that materials/objects hold a power to manifest “modes of meaning in the world, dispositions of thought and comportment.”26 To him, the body and therfore the soul identifies with materials. To reconfigure these identifications is to produce new and profound modes of meaning.

This notion was a result of developing a process of listening to natural materials. This took to form of embedding found objects from the sites of trauma and embedding them into a receving material (see page 64). This process yielded textural and sculptural masses, unique to the found object that was recovered from the site. These new objects hold the potential from bodily identification with the history of a place. Nature begins to speak.

26. Yukio Lippit. Understanding Culture through Material Artifacts. Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning. Harvard. Accessed April 27, 2021.

LISTENING TO MATERIAL

1 FOUND

Natural material, like this bark from an oak tree at the Newberry site, is found in situ. 2 DISPLACED

The historical material is brought to studio where it is cast into a receiving material.

3 EMBEDDED

The historical material is nested in the receiving mass. 4 REVEALED

The mass is separated into fragments, exposing the historic material and the textures that they impressed into the receiving material.

Surely the people is grass.

Isaiah 40:7