Entropy Observation Outposts

various sizes (approx. 10cm x 13cm x 13cm)

 

Description

Stones stitched into fabrics (red loden, felt & knitting, found crochet pot holders)

 

Themes, comments & storylines

These objects are placed in the open grounds outside my cabinet of textiles, serving as signpost for the approaching visitor, and at the same time, perhaps, as a temporary abode for our six-legged cohabitants and other assorted flora and fauna. Made from natural materials displaced and shaped by culture, now given back to the forces of nature in a gesture of offering, these objects on the threshold of nature and culture are observation posts of uncontrolled entropy with their own charge of affectivity.

Degradation of artefacts seen as negative because associated with a loss of cultural knowledge & memory – but are there different stories to be told, different memories to be made in the process?

DeSilvey (2006:424)  proposes “an approach that understands the artefact as a process, rather than a stable entity with a durable physical form […] to address some of the more ambiguous aspects of material presence (and disappearance)," a  different kind of remembering in decay, at the threshold of nature and culture “where what we call ‘human’ unravels into what we call ‘other’, that the most ambiguous perceptions seems to lie most thickly, and promise most fully.” (325) The artefact “as a temporary arrangement of matter, always on its way to being somethings else” (334).

 

 

De Silvey, Caitlin (2006), Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things, in Journal of Material Culture, Vol.11(3), p. 318 – 338, Sage Publications, London Thousand Oaks, Ca and New Delhi

 

 

“Affectivity and entropy are axes of critical insight along which art gestures slide the habits of thought into a condition of surprise to disturb the epistemological conventions.” (Drucker 2004:591)

“Affectivity and entropy are intensified gestures of differentiation. […] Rather than defining art as an entirely separate domain, affectivity and entropy suggest that fine art is a use, a way of working, a gesture of distinction, within the realm of material culture and of its objects, things and stuff. Each describes a distinctly different mode of transformation. The affective gesture puts material objects (or stuff, that is, cloth, string, things that are often shaped by use after they are purchased in bulk) into an organized construction.[ …] the affective gesture brings the inert to life, it rehumanizes material” (Drucker 2004: 593).

 

 

Drucker, Johanna (2004), Affectivity and entropy: production aesthetics in contemporary sculpture, in Adamson, Glenn (ed) (2010), The Craft Reader, Berg, Oxford, New York, p. 588 – 595

 

 

 

  more on decay, deterioration and desintegration

Entropy affecting the researcher