The word Encaustic, dates from the late 16th century: via Latin from Greek enkaustikos, from enkaiein ‘burn in’, from en- ‘in’ + kaiein ‘to burn’. Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek painters as far back as the 5th-century. Most of our knowledge about the origin of the hot wax painting comes from the writings by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History from the 1st Century AD described the technique. The most well-known encaustic paintings from those Ancient Times are most probably the very life-like Faiyum Mummy Portraits of Egypt (produced around 100 – 300 AD)
During the Middle Ages, more artists turned to tempera, fresco, and oil painting techniques that did not require the cumbersome task of building charcoal fires which, was required to liquefy the wax paints. However, although encaustic painting declined, it was not abandoned completely. It did enjoy a minor revival with artists like Lucas Cranach and Andrea Mantegna who were both known to experiment with encaustic painting.
(Sourced from: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/encaustic-ancient-painting-technique)
REPURPOSING THE ARCHITECTURE OF INSECTS:
The following extract was taken from a Research Gate article and was written to accompany an exhibition of encaustic artwork about the science and conservation of bees at the Art.Science.Gallery, Austin, TX.
“Of the world’s animal-derived media, it is the wax of honey bees (Apis spp.) that has most profoundly impacted artists, particularly those creating encaustics. The honey bee is a builder and an architect, and the wax comb constructed by a society of honey bees transcends a bodily product; it serves as the substrate that houses and shelters brood and food, and the platform for all of the nest activities”.
(Sourced from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275100490_Encaustics_repurposing_the_architecture_of_insects on 02/04/2024)
I feel that the medium of melted beeswax, damar resin and heat bring with it a sense of sealing, preserving and protecting. I feel that introducing this medium brings across and strengthens the feelings of preservation and protection as suspended pigment is laminated between layers of wax.
Modern artists who have worked with encaustic medium:
Jasper John is an American painter born in 1930 (aged 93) and is best known for his painting called: ‘Flag’ 1954. In America, this put the use of encaustic back into ‘mainstream’
(More about John’s for in the following link: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/jasper-johns-10-works-to-know)
Why I am drawn to encaustic:
In the process of trying to find a medium and method that would best suit my materials and would stay true to the values of using natural materials and my process focussed approach, I struggled and explored many options. I wanted a method that would allow me to work in transparent layers that has the ability to reveal my process but also speak of the concept of time, the complex layers of our psyche and our interconnectedness with nature and others. Our ‘multipleness’?
Initially I looked at working with vellum/tracing paper combined with clear resin. This seemed complex and artificial as well as unforgiving. I experimented with glass over my artwork, using soot of a candle to draw on the glass. I was not satisfied with this as the glass was too heavy and I needed to work with more layers.
Although I have only started to use this medium, I find that this might be a great match for my drawings and possibly also as a finishing medium of ceramic work. Beeswax and damar resin are beautiful natural ingredients and the alchemy of confining them feels like a perfect marriage as their qualities complement each other. Working with encaustic gives me the ability to work with an optical density of interesting textures and luminous layers but it also has to potential to give phenomenological density of human experiences, subjectivity and paradoxes. Paradoxes between the seen and the unseen, the certain and the uncertain, between order and chaos and between understanding and wonder.
Encaustic medium is primordial. Using the ancient medium can speak of an enthrallment with time and matches the slow process with which I work while allowing me to use the various pigments and drawing material and possibly even found objects. I also like the idea that layers get fused together with heat. Fusion is a great word to describe interconnection and union. Seeing that this lines up so well with the values of my practice and the concepts for this MA research, I would like to see how far I can push the boundaries of working with this medium.
Definition of the word fusion according to Collins dictionary:
1. COUNTABLE NOUN
A fusion of different qualities, ideas, or things is something new that is created by joining them together.
2. VARIABLE NOUN
The fusion of two or more things involves joining them together to form one thing.
Synonyms: merging, uniting, union, merger.
I end this post with a quote from Henri Bergson:
‘Duration is the continuous life of the past into the present. Without this survival of the past into the present, there would be no duration, only instantaneity.’
Henri Bergson, An introduction to Metaphysics, 1903
This idea links with my belief that our conscious state is not separate and discrete moments but as a multiplicity constantly unfolding. Interconnection with nature and others. Reality is a temporal process, a continuing becoming. The instant of our perception is a combination of a complex interconnection of experiences, genes, heritage, society, nature and otherness.
I look forward to playing around with background (faded) and foreground (crisp) layers pointing to the focus of our consciousness and the state/influence of the subconscious and unconscious mind as well as the presence of invisible forces that effect us whether we are aware of it or not (such as a spiritual realm, microbes and genes).
I hope that this way of working might capture something about our human experience. Our sense of the world. Not as a single coherent thought or feeling, perception or emotion but as multiple and unfixed. Subject to revision and wonder.
Photo’s of my current experiments with encaustic will be added here in the future. Here is a video of the start of some new work with cracked clay:
Week 13: Where is the work? Where is the artist? Where is the audience?
Exercise 1:
- Example of another artist who connects with audience through their work’:
Mark Dion is an artist who was recently brought to my attention. Below you will find a video of Mark’s approach and closely looks at a unique art installation as part of a collection called ‘Neukom Vivarium’:
In this video the viewer follow Dion on a journey during which he brings a ‘nurse log’ – a fallen Hemlock tree which is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna – into the heart of Seattle. The tree is put into a structure that is carefully designed to create the exact environment for the fauna and flora on the log to flourish. Highlighting the complicated environment that nature is able to achieve. The finished hybrid space – a showroom, classroom or laboratory where people can come to experience and Alice through the rabbit hole effect.
He tries to affect the viewer through the sense of the marvelous and wonderful. Emphasising nature as a process and encouraging people to ask different type of questions. I think there is a juxtaposition of this fallen tree yet only half of it’s life is over sine it is now giving life to fauna and flora. I think this is a very bold statement piece that very much brings the viewers into an enchanting environment. Mark also collaborated with many specialists and teams in order to create this installation. I can image many relationships were built and that Mark would have had to give away some ownership. His position he says is not the type of art who ‘spends a lot of time imagining a better ecological future but rather holding up a mirror to the present. We’re at a moment in time where we have a great test ahead of us. If we pass the test, we get to keep the planet.’ ‘I’m not interested in nature. I’m interested in ideas about nature.’
https://www.youtube.com/embed/bujPPF26ipM?feature=oembedAccessed on 22nd of May 2024
Mark Dion’s way of curating inspires me and he summarises his relationship to science so well in the following statement:
While he often uses scientific methodology in his work, Dion said the artist has other tools available to them that scientists can’t use.
“Science is bound by certain rules, and if you’re a scientist, you can’t really speak ironically, you can’t use humor, you can’t use metaphor and all of these allegory, all of these things that are really like the bread and butter of artists,” he said. “We can work on similar things, but we come to it with very different vocabularies and with a very different focus. We’re not in any way the same thing. And certainly, I always think we’re allies because we have the same enemies—small mindedness, fundamentalism, prejudice, all of these kinds of issues. That’s what potentially could bind us together. We’re both involved in inquiry, and we’re both involved in sort of exploding conventional perception and finding new things.”
Source: https://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/artsatunl/13576/78431 accessed 22 May 2024
Two examples of ways artists have created experiences for the viewer/audience that extend beyond the work itself.:
- Tania Bruguera one such artist. In her work Surplus Value (2012), it is a sculptural work whose activation includes the intervention of the audience which may change the appearance and finishing of the sign by working with the aid of an electric sander. This participatory work as part of the Immigrant Movement International. In order to enter Surplus Value, museum visitors waited in a long line, and some were randomly allowed to enter, while others were submitted to lie detector tests asking about their travel history.
I feel that the participation of the audience holds a lot of power, because I believe the viewer turned participant will certainly gain empathy and insight into the mind of the artist and that which she advocates for through their embodied experience.
‘Surplus Value’ begins with the piece of news published on December 2009 by the press on the theft of the metal sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp – now a museum to the memory of the holocaust, with the well-known words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free) which has become the emblem of Nazi cynicism – by a criminal gang with the purpose of selling it in the black market for historic and antique gadgets. The Polish police found the sign hidden and divided into three parts. Successive information pointed out that the robbery had been commissioned and the agreed price was 150 000 euros.”
(Sourced: https://taniabruguera.com/surplus-value/#:~:text=Surplus%20Value%20is%20a%20sculptural,aid%20of%20an%20electric%20sander. 22 May 2024)
2. Suzanne Lacy and her ‘Silver action’ in 2013, sees herself as a facilitator of a process and does not see the work as her own. “In a large room you see this very expansive tableau of women (over 60 years of age) sitting around yellow cloth tables. The audience comes in and is then drawn into the sphere of the visual they are also part of the performance. Each projection on the wall has in front of it a person sitting at a computer taking the time to listen to someone. That person is transcribing their personal narrative as they write themselves into history. I should say very clearly this is actually not a project about aging and not a sentimental project about older women and no isn’t that nice house that we should take care of them this is a project about discrimination and inequality”
What I loved about this piece of performance art is the projector showing as someone types live. To me it speaks about being listened to and heard, about honoring those who have lived longer and have wisdom to share and perspective on life. I’ve never come across such a performance. Not only were they able to collect all these stories and insight from these ladies in order to address discrimination but they’ve created and space where the audience walk between these tables and what they see on the projections are almost like reading the mind of the person listened to. The audience becomes part of the performance, because it’s about being heard and understood.
(Source: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/tate/participation-performance/participation/v/suzanne-lacy-silver-action, Accessed 22 May2024)
Exercise 2:
Two artists working in a way that connects to my own work and ideas (one physical exhibition and one digital):
Mark Dion:
Mark Dion would be one artist. I am not only drawn to his work because of my love for collections and the curiosity cabinet but also agree with his tendency to question the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society. As well as the agendas and ideology that creep into public discourse and knowledge production.
Physical exhibition: THEATER OF EXTINCTION 2022. What I take away from looking at this exhibition is the uncluttered white space that he uses. Each piece is able to speak without other work distracting from it. Since I will also be doing a selection of sculpture, drawings/2D work and then some video projection, this exhibition really relates to what my exhibition could feel like. In this exhibition, Mark Dion uses his work to investigate systems of knowledge production and presentation, and to critique the underlying assumptions that determine how disciplines like science, geography, and art classify, organize, and display information.
(souced: https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/634-mark-dion-theater-of-extinction-tanya-bonakdar-gallery-los-angeles/. Accessed 22May 2024)
Online/digital exhibition: I struggled to find an online exhibition of Dion. Luckily I came across this one called: Melangcholy museum that presents very well. Although there are no bells or tricks to the online presence of this exhibition, I appreciate how clearly it communicated through photos (showing context as well as close up details, there are video’s and various links/tabs you can click to follow links to more details of objects etc. It is almost like a web-page entirely dedicated to this exhibition. I think it is clear, unpretentious and well designed.
(Sourced: https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/melancholy-museum-love-death-and-mourning-stanford. 22 May 2024)
William Kentridge:
Physical exhibition: William Kentridge at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: ‘In praise of shadows’ is a physical exhibition that I came across (see source below). In this article, this show, curated by Ed Schad showcased the work of Kentridge. In the heart of the space was a video-room playing 11 films made between 1989 and 2020. This was highly praised for its use of humour, sound and music along with narration that kept the viewers attention while portraying the dark parts of history.
As my exhibition will also involve sculpture, drawing and video, it was very inspiring to see how this was curated.
(Source: https://glasstire.com/2023/08/01/seriously-playful-william-kentridge-at-the-museum-of-fine-arts-houston/. 22 May 2024)
Online/digital exhibition: The link below takes you to documentary of the artist called: ‘Anything is possible’. I have always admired William Kentridge as well as stop motion animation. He links his animations with his understanding of life as process and not as fact. The moving image was a perfect fit for him. I love how the documentary was designed with his art, animation, music and narration by die artist. His aim is to recreate the passion of the emotion. The music together with the visual is powerful.
(https://art21.org/watch/william-kentridge-anything-is-possible/full-program-william-kentridge-anything-is-possible/. 22 May 2024)
Exercise 3:
For my exhibition I will be curating my work with a combination of the following concepts mind: The curiosity cabinet (visual and concept), museology/scientific presentation (visual influence), ecological expedition and documentary (style video).
I would like to display my work in and alongside a curiosity cabinet. The curiosity cabinet/vitrine/apothecary was often used in the 16th and 17th centuries by collectors to establish socioeconomic status but also as conversation point. It is fair to say that any curiosity cabinet, museum showcase or vitrine was representative of what its curator valued most.
The rational for using such a cabinet to display my own work is twofold. It communicates what I care about/value most. Instead of the materialistic nature of the typical curiosity cabinet, my display will portray the implicit and ethereal/unseen in combination with natural foraged items and also with items that resemble an apothecary or alchemical cabinet. I feel this will be a good fit for they alchemical processes of material making but also echoing the alchemical transformation of psyche that happens in the material and art making process, relating to theory. The second reason would be that it allows me to display parts of my raw materials and process.
As a physical outcome for the exhibition, I would like to use a space that I have already identified – An historical building in the heart of Jonkershoek valley where I do all my runs/hikes from which my inspiration comes. I would like to use the walls to display frames drawings alongside curiosity cabinets filled with my material and the natural items found during each run. I would then like to set up a projector and screen for the purpose of showing my documentary and process. Additional material will involve various sensory experiences for my audience in the form of things they can smell, touch, taste and move. OR codes next to each work could provide links to sound and location where the work was made.
For an online outcome, I would like to create a page on my website which will be titled MA Fine Art exhibition and will include the following:
- A video documentary of my position as an artist and my process.
- A walk/fly-through of the physical exhibition space along with narration and sound-scapes made in nature.
- A catalogue in PDF format with a short description of each artwork. This is necessary so that my online audience can pause in from of an artwork for as long as they want to.
- QR codes will also ensure that my audience will have access to sound experiences along with the work as well as location.
Starting to look forward to it all coming together. Looking at these artists was very helpful and inspiring!