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ferrous
FERROUS
2023
FERROUS (series), 2023
Detail of ferrous drawing
Transfer Paper, collected ferrous sand, pot magnet.
Bristol, 180gsm
FERROUS is a collection of carbon drawings that were produced for Wild Mind, 2023 – a presentation at the AVA, Cape Town.
Fine particles of rock and sand track together across carbon transfer paper. Following the pull of a heavy magnet, they leave traces of their intrinsic phenomena on the page below. The result is a slow, subdued, sometimes violent accrual of mark as the magnetite repeats, circles, rushes, halts, jerks, glides and accumulates, leaving a layered, dense noise as a record of its phenomenal self.
The carbon residue on the page sits between multiple agencies, recalling the properties of not just the medium and its magnetic field, but the maker and the grainy, static quiet of consciousness; a record of entanglement. Twin fields.
I had been thinking how cultures at large affix subject/object orthodoxies through the prism of language and grammar. In general, most note an inherent difference between human and nonhuman. Here, I became interested in Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction; which does not fix what is subject and what is object in advance. It is rather, a non-dominant way of seeing that recognises the agential quality of all things as emergent, through their ‘intra-action.' They're individual agencies being a feature of their entanglement, not precursors to it.
This ‘intra-action’ took place between the components of this work; the ferrous medium lifted from the soil by magnetic capture, the dusty release of the transfer sheet and the expectant surface of the paper, the size of magnet’s field and the hand that set it in motion. There were not one but rather a set of fields, overlapping in waves of potential. The drawings are a witness to the animacy and wildness of natural phenomena, while reminding the self that it too, is animate, wild and phenomenal.
Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working [together] inseparably.
Whitney Stark, (2016) How Matter Comes to Matter, newmaterialism.eu
Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world: we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming.
Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Untitled I, 2023.
Collected ferrous sand, pot magnet, carbon transfer sheet.
Archival Paper
297mm x 210mm
Twin Field, 2023.
Collected ferrous sand, pot magnet, carbon transfer sheet.
Bristol
420mm x 594mm
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A worn sheet of carbon transfer paper reveals the page below.
The transfer sheets carried both their own memory and motion. A mirror of the record preserved on the page yet light enough to bend and fold, lending dimension to a previous flatness. This led to the below inversions where details of the original drawings were photographed and suspended so that they hung in folds and loops, the images gained a depth that animated the fields even further, creating the illusion of something penetrable; less a surface, more a nest that could be fallen into or traversed.
Agency is not an individual property. Rather who and what acts, is a phenomenal question. It is a decision, an incision, a cutting together/apart of the agentic qualities of phenomena that emerge in the ongoing performance of the world. This means that we might recognise agency in different forms as relations, movements, repetitions, silences, distances, architecture, structures, feelings, things, us/them/it, words…
Barad, Karen. (2007).
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and
the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
Durham: Duke University Press.
FIELDS (series), 2023.
Giclee print
Suspended ferrous carbon drawing, inversion.
Felix Schoeller True Fibre, 200gsm
91cm x 136cm
Editions of 5
Wild Mind, 2023
AVA, Cape Town.