Like the puddle grows

Like the puddle grows

a manifesto for making

i. Tim Ingold defines making as ‘a process of growth’ and proposes that human making is equivalent to the making that happens in nature; ‘the difference between a marble statue and a stalagmite is not that one has been made and the other not’. He calls for makers to ‘join forces’ with their materials ‘to bring them together or split them apart, synthesise and distil, in anticipation of what might emerge.’ Makers, he says, ‘intervene in worldly processes that are already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world that we see all around us - in plants and animals, in waves of water, snow and sand, in rocks and clouds - adding his own impetus to the forces and energies in play.’ 1

Thinking about how to ‘make like nature’ was the basis for the development of this manifesto. Considering how the puddle is made as well as how the puddle, itself, makes. Exploring the processes that played out for it to be formed, as well as those that it activates or mediates. Incorporating and developing ideas from a wide range of sources including anthropology, theoretical physics, ecology, philosophy, music, poetry and children’s stories, as well as my own experiences as a maker using ceramics, I use the puddle as a model of the made and as a model for the maker.

Ingold’s argument also forefronts the temporal aspect of materiality, saying that ‘the properties of materials are not attributes but histories’ and that making ‘is a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming 2 This engagement with history, potential and temporality in and through making is a key component of what follows.

2 Ibid, p.30-31.

1 Tim Ingold, Making, (Oxford: Routledge, 2013 ), p.21.

Like

the puddle wasSteal by gentle attrition

Break off large pieces and scrape out small scraps. Move stones and atoms. Fragment and accumulate.

Anything is your matter

Source from all that moves past you and everything you move through. Everything is a potential material.i

Mix and morph erratic

Hold all of the past in your material. Flux in space and time. Be of ageless consistency and ephemeral volatility.iv

ii. Erosion is the main force that breaks up and reshapes the planet’s surface, ‘liquid water is the major agent of erosion on Earth’.3 Water transports and deposits particles, minerals and other elements from the earth’s rocks and soils (and any other object or substance that is at, within or beneath the surface). Bodies of water are thus accumulations of an array of objects and substances both large and small that derive from many places and times, near to them and far from them.

iii. The puddle in the forest consisted, materially, of mostly wet mud. On analysis this mud turned out to have a high enough clay content to be workable and turned into hard ceramic when fired in a kiln - evidently a potential material for making sculpture. Other things present in the puddle, albeit in smaller amounts, can also be used in the ceramic process. Organic matter from plants - pine needles, twigs, moss - can be burnt to ash and then used as a ceramic glaze.4 Even beyond ‘natural’ materials, the substances and things of the contemporary world could all be put into a kiln to be melted, burnt or transformed inside it.5 The potential for almost any found object or substance to be used in the ceramic making process is explored in the studio research undertaken for this project and in my practice more widely. See Appendix A Everything is a Material.

iv Ageless consistency and ephemeral volatility is adapted from Tim Ingold’s description of a tree in a forest;

At its base the wood has all but turned to stone. The roots, following the contours of the outcrop and penetrating its crevasses, hold the rock in an iron grip. But up above, delicate needles vibrate to the merest puff of wind… How is it possible for such ageless solidity and ephemeral volatility to be brought into unison? 6

Like the tree, the puddle manages to bring into unison both an agelessness and a volatility A puddle is a mixture of materials - from nearby and far away, spanning the recent and geologically distant past. As a mixing up of these bits, it becomes ageless (and perhaps also space-less). It is also an object that grows and shrinks capriciously, always with the possibility of drying up or reappearing after rains, the flux of water in and out makes its form ambiguous, volatile and ephemeral.

3 ‘Erosion’, National Geographic, <https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/erosion> [accessed 25 January 2022].

4 Plant ash glazing is, in fact, the earliest form of glazing that existed as far back as 4000 years ago. Brian Sutherland, Glazes from Natural Sources, (London: A&C Black, 2005), p.6.

5 All materials are of course ultimately derived from nature - metal comes from rock ore, plastics from the oil of prehistoric creatures etc.

6 Tim Ingold, Correspondences, (Newark, UK: Polity Press, 2020), p.23.

Like

the puddle forms -

Every droplet’s story

Rain a hundred songs hard onto your surface. Let each one make you and mark you with its fresh idea. v

Gravity’s hands

Wait always at the lowest point Let time flow heavy towards you vi

Polish rubble

Melt into the voids of ruins. Glaze the edges of broken shards.v

v. Bob Dylan is quoted as saying that, ‘Hard Rain is a desperate kind of song. Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.’ 7

vi. Water was not present on the earth when it was formed 4 billion years ago, it was delivered here inside meteorites that fell to the earth in the years following.1 All water that exists on the earth today is the same water that existed here millions of years ago (and billions of years ago in some other distant place in the universe). The water in our bodies, that we drink and re-drink over and over in our lifetimes, links us to the deep space and time of the universe. Water cycles through everything in a constant eternal loop.8 Gravity (and heat) drive this cycle in the earth’s atmosphere. Moving water from oceans to clouds, through rain and snow, puddles, rivers and lakes and back to the ocean. The water cycle includes all living beings (whom all consist of at least 60% water). Water erodes, reacts with and breaks down the landscape. When water moves it carries many things with it, when it settles those things momentarily coalesce. The puddle does not drive or control this cycle, it merely positions itself at a dip in the land and lets gravity do the work.

vii. In the illustrated children’s book Square, the title character attempts to carve a sculpture of his friend Circle. He chips away in vain, eventually reducing his square block to a pile of rubble. Despairing he says ‘I push blocks, I do not shape them. I am not a genius’. When Circle returns she sees herself reflected in the pool of water that has collected inside the rubble and declares Square is a genius. This simple tale of making, failure, inadvertent creation and different ways of seeing speaks of an approach to making - one that values breakage and breakdown, one that accepts the will of the material, and one that considers the ephemeral and fluid as equally valuable as the solid and permanent.9

7 ‘Bob Dylan, Hard Rain Lyrics’, AZLyrics, <https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/ahardrainsagonnafall.html> [accessed 1 June 2022].

8 ‘Chronology of the formation and evolution of the Solar System’, Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System> [accessed 2 March 2022].

9 Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, Square, (London: Walker Books, 2019).

Like the puddle does

Fossilise

Be fluid then solidify. Embrace the forms of life in your mould. Diarise them in your sediment. x

Mobilise

Be walked through by blackbirds, foxes and children. Ripple their energy. Stick stolen to their feet.x

Feed

Give to the roots and the lapping deer that drink from you. Be a reliquary for their faeces will make new faces.x

x

viii Fossilise, mobilise, feed is an adaptation of Robert Smithson’s list of processes that ‘could be turned towards the making of art’ if, as he calls for, artists exclude the technological and instead look to the natural. The processes in Smithson’s list (‘Oxidation, hydration, carbonatization and solution’) are ‘the major processes of rock and mineral disintegration’. Here I propose that if we look beyond mineral chemistry to the interactions that occur between the puddle and the living world, we might discover yet more processes of ‘a more fundamental order ’ in nature. 10

ix

Fossils are formed when an organism is buried by water containing debris and minerals. A living (or recently dead) being is submerged in the sediment and is then compressed, cast, or transformed over geological time - its physical shape preserved.11

The processes that occur in fossilisation are echoed in ceramics - when a mould is made or cast taken, when a void form is created through burnout in the kiln, or even just through the coating or embedding of a thing within clay. So too are the processes of mineral exchange - the heat of the kiln catalysing a similar exchange of atoms and molecules across surfaces and between layers as happens between roots, fungi and the soil.

When a human or animal body walks through it, the puddle’s surface is set off into ripples - energy moves across its surface. There is also a translocation of the puddle’s own material as sticky mud and water clings to these feet and moves off with them to a new place.

xi

A puddle sits, on the forest floor, at the centre of the forest ecosystem. This ecosystem is a cycle of minerals and nutrients that fuel all the life and make all the matter in the forest. Nutrients are taken up by roots to feed trees, from the trees into the mycelial network, which in turn transfers nutrients to other species. Animals drink from pools of water and eat plants, depositing their faeces and returning nutrients to the ground. The ground itself consists of dead plant matter, soil and rock that is being constantly mixed up, microscopically, by living organisms. The puddle is part of this constant cycle, it is made by it and it sustains it.12

Smithson uses the chemical processes of erosion as his examples, but bodies of water can act in many more ways than this. Mediating processes of chemical exchange, not just with the rocks and soil of the ground, but with the organisms that live around it. Through both chemical and mechanical processes puddles transfer the matter and energy of living, moving bodies as well as act to preserve them beyond their own lifetime. Parts of the puddle cling to these bodies in transit, and thus the puddle also extends itself spatially through stowing away with them.

10 ‘by excluding technological processes from the making of art… discover other processes of a more fundamental order... Oxidation, hydration, carbonatization and solution (the major processes of rock and mineral disintegration) are four methods that could be turned towards the making of art.’

Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, 1968’ in Materiality ed. Petra Lange-Berndt, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015), pp.149-153 (p.151).

Such processes are in fact already in use in ceramics (most of them have been since the very early beginnings of human existence).

11 ‘Types of Fossils and how they are formed’, Sciencing, <https://sciencing.com/describe-types-fossils-8147260.html> [accessed 9 May 2022].

12 Mohammed Rahman, Yuji Tsukamoto and RS Ashikur, ‘Th e Role of Quantitative Traits of Leaf Litter on Decomposition and Nutrient Cycling of the Forest Ecosystems’, Journal of Forest Science, 29 (2013), p.42. <https://doi.org/10.7747/JFS.2013.29.1.38> [accessed 19 April 2022].

Like the puddle sees -

Deep reflections

Mirror inexactly. Swallow all time into the now.x i

Hot rainbows

Let the heat raise your vapours Be a prism of nature x i

Vague Déjà vu

See the already seen, and maybe the not yet.xiv

xii. The opening line of Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror reads ‘I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately’.13 The reflective surface of a puddle can be, when perfectly still, mirror like - but more often its image is disturbed by breeze, beetles, branches or welly boots - this imperfect inexactness intertwines the image with its tangible matter. It brings the visual and physical being of the puddle together

In the second stanza of the poem, the mirror takes the form of a lake, in which a woman looks at her reflection. “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman. Rises toward her day after day’. The old woman is present (in the reflection) but this presence is undercut by the invisible (yet metaphorically material) presence of her ‘drowned’ younger self. In the visual realm what remains is the fact of age in the now

xiii. Though rainbows are commonly experienced after downpours of rain, they can occur when water rises as mist or vapour from bodies of water - a spectrum of coloured light born of heat. In the discussion of results in Part 2: Puddle Part Study, I discuss how the kiln can act to split colours from monotone materials - the heat driving out water and instigating reactions that allow the chemical components to show their coloured face.

xiv The experience of déjà vu is, as Henri Bergson calls it ‘in the actual moment, a memory of that moment….of the past in its form and of the present in its matter…a memory of the present.’14

He proposes that, ordinarily, memory is created at the same time as perception - as a simultaneous doubling, a doubling that our brains normally ignore - ‘We ignore this memory in the moment because we have no need of the memory of things whilst we hold those things themselves [in our perception]’. But, says Bergson, now and again we become aware of this doubling, and that is when we experience the feeling of déjà vu - that we have ‘already seen’, even ‘already lived’ , the present moment.

‘the memory is to the perception as the image reflected in the mirror is to the object in front of it…..Each moment of our life offers two aspects: it is actual and virtual, perception on one side and memory on the other. It splits as and when it is posited.…..If we become conscious of this duplication, it is the entirety of our present which must appear to us at once as perception and memory And yet we know full well that no life goes twice through the same moment of its history, and that time does not remount its course’15

But do we ‘know full well that time does not remount its course’? In fact, in modern science the notion that time passes at all is commonly taken to be false - the flow of time is just a figment of our perception. This notion is generally accepted across physics and philosophy alike, and arose from Einstein’s theory of relativity 16

Why then do we feel that time does flow? Julian Barbour proposes that our brains create the impression of time by comparing two data points, assigning them (mistakenly) a temporal order 17 But what if, sometimes these data points aren’t interpreted as past and future? What if sometimes we see these data points for what (and where and when) they really area? Perhaps in a déjà vu we are not, as Bergson suggests, experiencing a memory of the present, but rather we are momentarily seeing through the illusion of time. Just for a moment our default perceptual system (that normally hides the true nature of time from us) transcends itself and allows us to perceive all events and times together. We feel we have ‘already seen’ what we are experiencing because we have - because we are.

If this is possible in déjà vu, then it could be possible at other times. Perhaps not as lucidly as in déjà vu, but more in whispers. Whispers from puddles in forests, or whispers from our correspondence with materials during the process of making.

13 Sylvia Plath, ‘Mirror ’ in Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath: Selected Poems, (London: Faber, 1985), p.32.

14 Henri Bergson, ‘Memory of the Present and False Recognition’ in Henri Bergson: Key writings, ed. Keith Pearson and John O Maoilearca, (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p.183.

15 Ibid.

16 ‘In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving.’

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time , (London: Transworld, 1988), p.38.

‘Special relativity has shown that the notion of the ‘present’ is also subjective…the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion, and … the universal ‘flow’ of time is a generalisation that doesn't work.’

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, (London: Penguin, 2015), p.58.

‘Our experience would seem to suggest that time passes. Our best science, however, strongly suggests that it does not.’ Sam Baron and Kristie Miller, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), p.13.

17 ‘Our brains generate the perceived impression of motion by using data on a minimum of two successive positions of the objects that we see moving. In my terminology, the brain creates the impression of motion by comparison of at least two Nows.’ Julian Barbour, ‘Time, Instants, Duration and Philosophy’, in Time & the Instant: Essays in the Physics and Philosophy of Time, ed. Robin Durie, (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), p.103.