Collecting and Holding Emptiness

Gouges – as I tour the grain barn with Wolski he talks of studying in Carrara, Italy, of having the marble mountains and quarries as a primary frame of reference.  He speaks of studying in France, both in Paris and in the south of the country, in the 1980s where he found himself trying to find a way to articulate his context and frames of reference which lay outside of the prevailing mood in Western Europe of that time.  His narrative tumbles across timelines, the thread is more about how he found a way through the materiality of clay not marble; its softness allowed him to gouge and to mould, to manipulate and embed rather than chip away at the solid block.  He shows me some marble reliefs into which he has carved footprints that look like those made in soft sand; these are delicately formed and I can understand in part why he has found clay to be such an important medium (Grave Stone, 1987).

We speak of Anna Maria Maiolino who makes a ritual of producing repeated elemental forms in unfired clay, setting them out on tables that become part altar part dinner table, she talks of the hand as ‘the first form’, relating to her work of the late 1980s, coincidental with the era when Wolski was working in a similar way.  She too was working within a restrictive regime, in the context of a dictatorship in Brazil.  Briony Fer writes that, for Maiolino, ‘the body is a cipher of meaning… part of her anatomy of part-objects and bodily organs that is the modern.’ Fer also references that her body acts as one of many moulds that are her preoccupation (Fer, 2010). Where Maiolino kneads and rolls, Wolski gouges, but these are both mechanical actions that somehow seem exempt from industrial models and modernity.  The organic materials become repetitively and serially presented as grids, systems and piles, but these systems highlight the individuality of each form and the differences between them.

Wolski’s mass accumulations and overscaled forms crowd out the floor, rooms and spaces within which they are placed, bringing a sense of impending disorder. The forms and tangles speak of instability.  The overcrowded sections of rooms give way to capaciousness in others.  There is relief before being overwhelmed once more; crosses moving along the floor and up the wall form an altar of sorts. 

In his book Hyperobjects (2013) Timothy Morton turns to the concept of viscosity as a force that sticks to oneself.  He speaks of aesthetic experience as something that pursues his innards, searching out the resonant frequencies of his stomach, intestines and face.  Drawing on Jean Paul Sartre, his language turns to that slipperiness of the viscous, its ‘sly solidarity’ between things or, as Sartre puts it ‘the slimy is myself’ (1943, p. 777).  What is foregrounded here is the sense of the viscous substance that falls back into itself, sticky returning to sticky and slowly dissolves once more (Morton, 2013, p. 30),  I turn to these thoughts of viscosity and stickiness in relation to Wolski’s gouged out forms as it offers a phenomenological rather than philosophical space from what we, in our humanly embodied form, become embedded in the earthly reality of those forms.  Our bodies can collapse into the clay forms, in a chiasmic act of rhetoric: it offers a sense of completeness through its reversal of structure.  As the hands reach in to gouge, so the gouging reaches out towards the hands.  

While for some the studio might become a space for solitude and escape from pasts and presents, for Wolski it appears that he openly encourages a range of voices and art historical collisions in to create a heady mix of thoughts and reflections, wrought through his material choices.

In one barn Wolski shifts the focus of the gouging chiasma towards silkworm cocoon shells, the parts left over after the silk has been harvested.  We discuss the careful process of producing natural silk, of feeding silkworms with quantities of mulberry leaves on which they gorge themselves before spinning their cocoon ready for that miraculous process of metamorphosis into silk moths.  A short-lived life, the moth’s purpose is to lay eggs for the next generation of worms and so the cycle of life repeats.  To extract silk the farmer must remove the cocoons early in the process and boil them to both kill off the transforming worm and to release the silk threads from their gummy substrate.  The farmer must take care to leave enough cocoons to ensure a good number of moths hatch and lay their eggs.

Wolski works with the waste cocoon shells, laying them flat and reactivating the remaining gummy substance to join them into large striated canvases such as Silk Landscape III (2013), or hanks of threadlike forms as in Silk Road (2010).  The lustre across the surface of these works is picked up by the evening light in the barn and the gallery lights in Łódź’s Textile Museum as part of Wolski’s ‘Tangles’ exhibition.  The colours shift from bright white to the earthy browns of the gouged clay works Cave Wall I and Cave – Body Imprints (1993).  As Wolski dragged with his hands, so the worm forms with its body, both working through the stickiness and both, eventually, requiring a form of digging out, gouging.

Silk thread and cloth is known for its lustre and drape.  It is soft and skin-like, temperature regulating and holding anti-bacterial properties.  It is also a viscous substance, hovering between solid and liquid.  If we return to Sartre, he says of viscosity that it is ‘neither material nor psychic’ (1943, p. 627) but a phenomenon that transcends the opposition of mind and body, that privileges clinging-ness. Mary Douglas finds in the viscous a state ‘in a process of change’ (1966, p. 38) and, like the silkworm, a space for reconsidering a subjectivity in which the solid and visible can be replaced by the viscous and the felt, collapsing boundaries and bodily edges.

In Wolski’s works there exists a form of ambivalence within the fecundity, that focuses upon this stickiness.  For Sartre, writing of depression in Nausea (1938), this is a dangerous space in which the body, the self, is threatening to dissolve into itself and into its physical and psychic world.  In Silk Landscape III (2010) and Oilcloth with prints (2022/2023), as with much of his oeuvre, we can see a play with this self-dissolving, not as self-indulgent or autobiographical narrative (although this is undoubtedly present), but rather as a means by which to explore what freedom can and might mean.  This brings a sense of yearning for freedom to the work.  The gouged-out forms and the pressed cocoons are framed by preoccupations with seeds, chains, tangles, oversized dresses and neckpieces, beads and pierced works (known as tattoos and in themselves offer another form of gouging out).  I am intrigued by the internal/external interplay in relation to the idea of gouging in Wolski’s works.  Hannah Arendt, in On Violence (Arendt, 1969) speaks of violence as being ‘by nature instrumental’, requiring justification by the end it pursues (1969, p. 44).  Gouging is both a desperate and violent set of actions.  Where Wolski claws out clay, excavating his forms, the silkworks whose residual casts he uses, first spin that cocoon, then chew their way out for their short-lived life as a moth. In both cases we can see systems of power played out with violent actions embedded within.   ‘Power and violence’, Arendt reminds us ‘are distinct phenomena’, but they usually appear together (1969, p. 45).  ‘Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of the gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience.  What never can grow out of it is power’ (1969, p. 46).

Taken in the context of these works (Silk Road, Silk Landscape) Wolski’s gouging, together with his gouging by proxy through the silkworm, takes on this dialogue between power and violence: the artist must give over his power and ego in relation to the clay in order to find the language of the gouge.  He uses this language precisely to diminish power structures and so offer the viewer a vision beyond power and violence, wrought through a desperate, violent set of actions.  As we meditate upon the clawed-out forms, the splayed silk cocoons, we become caught up in this interplay and directed towards the potency of collective action.  They offer a space to both realise Proudhon’s remark that ‘the fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman’s prudence’ (quoted in Arendt, 1969, p. 7) and for realising and materialising such actions as considered, political and agential forms of expression.   

Returning to the concept of collecting or holding emptiness, I want to signal here that Wolski’s gouging out, creating and collecting emptiness (the clawed out pieces are retained, forming an evidence trail of the actions and intra-actions of the gouging), also becomes a way of thinking about being in community, it is an invitation to come into sticky relationship with the materials and materialisation of experience and the artist.  The stickiness allows time, holds space, for close encounter or, as Arendt would frame it, space ‘for the mind to go visiting’ (1982, p. 42) and this visiting, as I would argue visiting does necessarily, entails not standing in assomeone else, but standing beside them, to listening and hearing to their perspective in mixture with one’s own.  The resultant elisions, revisions and new understandings drawn from this experience allow each’s knowledge and thus imagination to become broader, something Arendt, following Kant, refers to as ‘enlarged mentality’ (1982, p. 42).

As we look at the marks on the clay, the gouged out handfuls of clay, and the connections to Maiolino’s ‘first form’, Wolski’s hospitality, his open-house invitation, precedes him.  This suggests an imagination that moves beyond an autobiography and speaks to a transnational denizen.  The denizen, Marsha Meskimmon asserts, ‘makes herself at home everywhere’ (2017, p. 25), but further becomes a way of ‘imagining and materialising ecologies of belonging’ that belong to a post migratory world (2017, p. 25).  Most importantly, Meskimmon speaks of ways in which art and art practices have the capacity to materialise space for thinking about worldmaking that is plural, inclusive and a reflective-progressive event within the world and she invokes us to adopt denizen-like mindsets and imaginations to enable this.