My position as an artist is that we’ve become so disconnected from Nature that we barely see it; to our severe detriment. We need to reintroduce magick into our lives. We need to encounter re-wonderment.
I attempt this through my practice, which is alchemical. Not alchemy in the crass sense of modern popular culture, but as it was understood by artisans during the heyday of alchemy in the 16th & 17th centuries. It is seeking to understand the world through a bodily engagement with materials. This is to seek what one historian of science, Pamela H. Smith, terms an artisanal epistemology.
My work involves transformation and various levels. From the most materially-focused level of transformation by heat of minerals to form glazes in the kiln, to the transformation at the level of the medium itself; clay works transformed into video and sound.
The Project
After a while, it started to dawn on me that the way I worked constituted an alchemical practice. I do not mean by this that I am trying to synthesis gold, the usual banal interpretation in popular culture. What I mean by an alchemical practice is exactly what the term was understood to mean to those practitioners in the heyday of alchemy, during the 15th and 16th centuries. That is to say, to paraphrase Paracelsus, that anyone taking something from nature and making something from it, is an alchemist. The endeavour is seen as seeking to understand the world through a bodily engagement with materials. This is to seek what the historian of science, Pamela H. Smith, terms an artisanal epistemology.
The work in my graduation show is an exploration of alchemical process through the medium of ceramic glazes. In my thesis paper I argue there are two ways in which artists have engaged with alchemy in their practice. Firstly, the “borrower”, being the artist who takes inspiration for works from the rich archive of allegorical alchemical imagery to be found in ancient texts. On the other hand there is the “adept”: an artist engaged in alchemy directly. My work derives from my being a borrower, sometimes an adept.
The egg form I have been using is a borrowing from the idea of the Philosophers’ Eggs which references the egg-shaped alembics used for alchemical procedures, but the idea of the egg was, for the famous alchemist, Dr. John Dee, a symbol of the oneness of the universe.
Alchemy historically has been associated with esoteric knowledge. The very reason for the allegorical nature of ancient texts and imagery is to create esoteric knowledge. I introduce an element of mystery into the work by glazing the interior of some of my Philosophers’ Eggs, introducing the glazes by blindly injecting glazes from small syringes. The alchemy takes place when the egg is fired in the kiln. The results of the transformation are not directly visible to us; at least not without smashing the egg. The egg contains a mysterious world, which I nevertheless explore by use of an endoscopic inspection camera. The resulting videos take us on a journey which leaves open questions of scale and meaning.
Transformation has always been central to the alchemical project. By stages, I mix glazes, transform them in the alchemical fire of the ceramics kiln. I further transform the medium by moving the results into video form. A third transformation is into sound. I construct a musical instrument by nesting hemispherical glazed forms into a structure that recalls the Neoplatonist cosmology of the universe as nested spheres. This cosmology was central to the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical ancient sage, associated with alchemy from earliest times.