The Object Absolute – is nought
Liadin Cooke 2015

EDGE

The Object Absolute – is nought is a test. Coming out of my enquiry around notions of boundaries its first manifestation was a bundle of small painted sticks not dissimilar to pick-up sticks, which I put together in the studio with the intention of looking at the collapse of an edge. Not a physical edge or edginess as in uneasy and tense, but an edge that tips over into the spaces between modes of thought: how might we look at and question things in today’s world of flow, change and immediate sensation?

BEGINNING

On the 24th February 2015, Rowan Bailey asked me if I would like to come to a meeting at the Rat and Ratchet pub in Huddersfield to talk about ideas around sculptural thinking. What is sculptural thinking, what is sculpture, what does thought look like? Rowan asked us all to bring something that might articulate ideas around sculptural thinking so I brought my painted sticks to the pub, held them in my hand resting their base on the surface of the table and let them drop – as in pick-up sticks – playfully, casually and unknowingly. As with pick-up sticks they rested where they fell and I watched with curiosity as people started to move them around.

The movement of falling became a pure articulation of my overriding interest in what ideas do before their objectification. What was important was that I was not showing an artwork I was showing the in-between - the germ of what might become.

I was also trying to visualize how the viewer sees the ‘thing’ within the thought. I wondered if others were engaged by the action, the resulting spaces or seeing an actual sculptural object?

I left these meetings no clearer in my own mind. In fact, if anything, I had more questions. Back at the studio I resumed what had been preoccupying my interest. Ideas around boundaries, walls, edges and the like absorbed me. What I had done with the sticks was merging into my thoughts about walls, something was collapsing - walls / sticks were tumbling down.

COLOUR

My use of colour is a tentative reflection of synesthetic identification and, though I had purposely used what I term ‘object’ colours to paint the sticks, their colour was to my mind functionless and irrelevant. Yet if I had left the sticks bare wood they would have been ‘just objects’ – the paint turned them into more than ‘just objects’ and they became something much more slippery – more thoughtful.

My next move was to make some drawings of the falling to try to pin down and fix my ideas. With no particular outcome in mind it was more of a studio exercise, a task to occupy my hands as I thought.

I made five drawings using gouache to give them solidity on the page; the blue, red and a nasty flesh tone were meant to be subtle and enquiring. I then made five more in monochrome to see what they would be like - hanging onto the nasty flesh tone so that they would have a little bit of reality. They became shadows.

I was surprised when I laid them out together to see that they did indeed mimic the falling of the sticks - only these drawings tumbled across the page and never really fell down. Perhaps I had made something that was in perpetual motion that in a sense mimicked or was a reflection of my continually shifting thoughts on sculpture? The drawings were between collapse. They were very different to what I had imagined their outcome to be. Their colour grated, the heaviness of the gouache felt leaden – I still did not know.

MEETING

Archives and an exhibition came into the equation in April. I started off by looking at the Leeds Sculpture Collection and stayed there. Initially, I browsed through the list of artists they have, looked them up online, made notes about those that nudged my attention, many of whom I have never heard of.

I made a visit to the store. A welcome opportunity to prowl around exploring ‘hidden’ works, though you know that they are catalogued, dusted and looked at on a relatively regular basis. Due to the lighting and the way the work was placed randomly on the shelves it was an adventure, my eye skipped over things and rested on others.

I took lots of photographs on that day not thinking much about what I was looking at, just snapping at what caught my eye. It wasn’t until I got back to my studio and downloaded the images that I saw a work I recognized. A work that I later found out to be Geoffrey Clarke’s Test Piece.

It wasn’t so much the linear quality that struck me, or the fact that I knew how it was made. I recognized the testing going on in the work – the fact that he had been trying to find something out. I presumed it was a technical test as opposed to my questions about the fluidity of the object / thought.

I went back to have another look at Test Piece and began to examine the spaces or gaps generated by the linear crisscrossing of the aluminium. This in turn, led to a further enquiry into his use of colour, particularly in his stained glass works. These were often incorporated into cast aluminium structures giving them a fluidity I that recognized as part of my own investigations. I have since found out that Test Piece was made as a trial for a stained glass commission for Ipswich Civic College in 1961, now in a private collection, it is installed at the end / edge of an infinity pool.

Though there is a marked similarity in the appearance of our two works, they are doing opposing things - restraining and letting go. Clarke’s Test Piece pushes to the edge and then is restrained by the rough frame of the aluminium. Water in an infinity pool flows to the edge and is then restrained by a wall. I don’t know where my edge is and in fact I don’t want one.

To an extent, both Clarke and myself are exploring space and form but in very different contexts – I am trying to collapse sculpture into something that sits between the object and the thought. Clarke was looking at how form sits in space. His work is a complex mixture of the tender, tangled and the hidden and much of it appears to accept vulnerability as part of its function. The drawings I made accept vulnerability as part of their hidden function. Perhaps The Object Absolute – is nought and Test Piece are collapsing space thereby allowing a form to reconfigure itself as a potential thought?

PERCEPTION

It is telling that the word ‘absolute’ comes from the Latin absolutus meaning ‘freed’ or ‘unrestrained’, for a lack of restriction denies the finite form of the object. We cannot look at an object without tainting it with our own (value-laden) perception of it. And can, in fact, an object seen by a human be anything but a perception? Therefore, are we unable to see a thing as it actually is; is there any chance of seeing any work as its thought?

As Emily Dickinson so aptly puts it - it is the object’s loss that is the gap I saw originally in Clarke’s Test Piece that I felt – and still feel – a need to fill.

Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price –

The Object Absolute – is nought –
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far –

Poem no. 1071 by Emily Dickinson