After Bergson

October 2006

18.5cm x 12cm x 3cm

 

Found book (original title ‘By Blow and Kiss’) with hooks and elastic bands added to the spine, small sample of tatting on front cover. Embroidery scissors tied to inside cover with white ribbon. Rectangular space cut out of partly glued together pages, filled with cotton and silk reels, rolled up measuring tapes, two crossed sharp needles.

 

Themes, Comments and Storylines

 

Made after reading ‘Matter and Memory’ by Henri Bergson. Bergson uses textile images and metaphors to explain the character of memory and time, the relationship between memory and perception and between matter and mind: spools, elastic bands, cutting and sewing. Here I have embedded these tools of thinking and communication into a book where they replace in part the written word, materialising the figurative. Bergson’s philosophy is particularly relevant to my research, but beyond the particular this book draws attention to the importance of concrete material experience in the making of abstract thought and theory.

 

Metaphor as “means of linking subjective and objective experience,”  “a way of mediating between concrete and abstract thought.”

 

Tilley, Christopher (1999), Metaphor and Material Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, p.8

 

 

“But it is not enough to cut out, it is necessary to sew the pieces together.”

 

Bergson, Henri (2004), Matter and Memory, Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Dover Philosophical Classics, Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, New York

 

“…metaphorical concepts can be extended beyond the range of ordinary literal ways of thinking and talking into the range of what is called figurative, poetic, colourful, or fanciful thought and language. Thus, if ideas are objects, we can dress them up in fancy clothes, juggle them, line them up nice and neat, etc.”

 

Lakoff , George &  Johnson, Mark (2003), Metaphors we live by, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London