Phase change

A course called "Phase Change: Ancient Matter and Contemporary Making”, offered by the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton (IHUM), taught by sculptor Martha Friedman and classics scholar Prof. Brooke Holmes.

The semester was conceived in three parts, each focusing on a material and the different ways that material changes its shape, is worked, or solidifies through different processes, linking back to ancient Mediterranean modes of making or ancient objects related to these materials:

1. Plaster / Death mask (plaster mold and wax cast of our own face)
2. Wax / Cylinder seal (wax seal and impression)
3. Rubber / Textile (weaving)

The course looked to unpack and perhaps heal certain binarized structures constructed through history regarding matter/form, body/mind, and nature/intention.

The semester included three projects: the death mask, creation of a cylinder seal mark-making device and impression, and a rubber weaving, each accompanied by a collection of readings, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, and two contemporary dance workshops.

For our final meeting, we gave a 10-minute presentation reflecting on some aspect of our work throughout the semester, proposing a final project that could be creative or scholarly.

Fragmented notes from my presentation (about fragmentation) follow below:

“I just want everyone to feel like they can move in their body.”

—Jerron Herman, interview with Pia Hargrove (2023)

Very early into the semester: readings and workshop in NYC on disability aesthetics in contemporary dance. We were supposed to be feeling comfortable in our bodies as we moved around the dance studio, responding to various movement cues. Jerron asked us to be like wax, rubber, and plaster. I was plaster always. I often feel frozen in my body in situations like these.

I recount my experience of having a plaster mask being cast on my face: I sat, unable to see or speak, only to breathe, for 20 minutes in a classroom. Others moved around me, talking and working, while some others sat in a similar state. The degree to which sitting under the mask is incapacitating could have been scary, but it actually came as a relief. I liked the feeling of being present without expectation of performance or engagement.

Eventually, the mask came off… with a fight. It took hair, eyelashes, and pulled my skin so severely that I was bruised. Removing the mask ended the frozen experience. What remained was this negative imprint. The mask was the only thing that saw me during that time, from the inside, in direct contact with my face.

Once removed, the mask creates a dual image, where in some lighting conditions, the features that should be light are in shadow, and vice versa.

Living in the mask and then taking it off allowed me to honor the frozenness, the blockage, and also let it exist as an inert fragment, something that can be set on its side, left on a table, and walked away from.

More on fragmentation: I discovered through unrelated, discrete encounters with:

1. A particular work (above) by surrealist painter Leonora Carrington

Recounting a major psychotic break that changed the course of her life, she emphasizes:

“…the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole”

And:

“I realized that my anguish—my mind, if you prefer—was painfully trying to unite itself with my body; my mind could no longer manifest itself without producing an immediate effect on my body—on matter…. my body no longer obeyed the formulas established in my mind, the formulas of old, limited Reason; that my will no longer meshed with my faculties of movement, and since my will no longer possessed any power, it was necessary first to liquidate my paralyzing anguish, then to seek an accord between the mountain, my mind, and my body.”

2. A talk and at a fundraiser for an assisted living center given by entomologist Doug Tallamy, about healing fragmented landscapes through by thoughtful gardening and planting in homes and commercial landscapes.

• I thought about fragmentation and as I sliced up my rubber slab painting, in preparation for a weaving assignment.
• Immersed in assigned readings by Jack Whitten, I thought about the slab as some access point between classical painting and sculpture, a place to work out thought with materials.

“The slab is where it’s at”

—Jack Whitten

“You’ll be rigid on this side. You'll be fluid on this side. You’ll be bifurcated. This will be bisected. You’ll deal with these, not warring . . . but these distinct sides that are talking to each other. How will we reconcile it?”

—Jerron Herman, interview with Pia Hargrove (2023)

• Whitten’s Woodshedding as indexing thought with materials
• Coming out of structures that contain me (us?)

I entered the final project through the course’s middle unit on Babylonian cylinder seals. We had read the epic story of Gilgamesh (English translation), and I returned to two scenes: Gilgamesh, who is half-god/half-mortal, and his adventure sidekick and presumed lover, Enkidu, wanted to enter a magical forest to take some of its magical wood. To pass, they must overcome its guardian, Humbaba. They succeed in killing Humbaba by convincing him to remove his seven magical cloaks. Without the cloaks, Humbaba is vulnerable, effectively mortal. In a bitter twist, Enkidu dies not from injuries sustained in the battle, but from an illness— an arbitrary, god-sent decree — which makes their victory feel hollow and leaves Gilgamesh undone. Later, Gilgamesh wanders through a jeweled garden, where the flowers and fruit are gemstones, which only full-gods can eat. He feels like an outsider in this garden, opulent but ultimately unsatisfying, and so returns to live with mortals and record his story. The jeweled garden reminded me of the untouchable god-like realm of painting, where one might wish to be nourished by its poisonous minerals (pigments). I read Gilgamesh as a steady, multifaceted quest for reconciliation between a split or fragmented existence, which can become impassable, and so impossible, when confronted directly. The cylinder seal is like a logo for an individual, but how do we choose our identifying marks under these conditions? And so my project would be about journeying between opposing yet persistent mythical spaces, slaying dragons by taking off, de-rigidifying via thought with rather than solely about material, approaching a Whitten-esque kind of magical-wood-shedding.

Further reading

Things I was reading at the time of constructing the diagram:

On Humbaba:

• Oppenheim, A. Leo. “The golden garments of the gods.”Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8.3 (1949): 172-193.
• Graff, Sarah B. Humbaba/Huwawa. New York University, 2012.
• Matheson, Linda Florence. Divinely attired. University of California, Davis, 2012.
• Ornan, Tallay. “Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven and the Contribution of Images to the Reconstruction of the Gilgameš Epic.” Gilgamesch Bilder eines Helden: Ikonographie und Überlieferung von Motiven im Gilgameš-Epos (2010): 229-260.

On the Jeweled Garden:

• Dickson, Keith. “The jeweled trees: Alterity in Gilgamesh.” Comparative Literature 59.3 (2007): 193-208.
• Van Dyk, Peet J. “In search of Eden: A cosmological interpretation of Genesis 2-3.” Old Testament Essays 27.2 (2014): 651-665.

Additional images

Cylinder seals

For what what might be considered a final project, I embarked on a series of “woodshedding” material experiments in mark making and casting with the textile/slab in mind, working between painting and garment, which are two forms that persist in my work.

Silicone painting

The feeling of being frozen in my body often extends to art-making, where I have typically worked with more constrained, mechanical approaches to skirt the chaotic and somewhat self-loathing sensation of seeing myself, or my hand, in the work. Here I attempted to ‘rubberize’ myself, painting with rubber, a constrained medium, but in an unconstrained way. These were initally inspired by some aspect of a rather unremarkable tapestry depicting the myth of Circe. Per a concurrent project dealing with viscous fluids and the depiction of hair, I think here I was targeting Odysseus’s hair… after a few iterations, I was more interested in layering colors of custom-pigmented silicone. The pigments are materials I have been collecting in my studio over several years, and I’ve developed a special interest in them, though I don’t always know what to do with them besides making hideous paintings.