Unfinished Substance Q. and A.

 

Why choose clay as your material to work with?

 

I have used clay a lot in the past, mostly for creating pots.  But I wanted to use it in a more corporeal, immersive way. 

 

With clay there’s the allure of viscosity: I want to experience that intriguing state between solid and liquid.  I like clay for its mutability, too.  It’s easy to change clay from something hard to something soft, or vice versa; and it’s easy to change its shape and form.  And I like its earthiness – when I am touching the clay I feel directly connected to the earth, I have a sense of grounded-ness.   

 

A piece of video art by William Cobbing called The Kiss (2004), featuring a couple with clay heads, was a particular inspiration when I began this exploration last September.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why “Unfinished substance”?

 

‘Unfinished substance’ is a translation of golem in its original meaning as an old Hebrew word.  It appears in the bible in Psalms 139:16, “Thine eyes did see mine unfinished substance” – meaning, in this case, that God saw me even when I was an embryo.  Centuries later, Jewish folklore understood golems to be semi-human figures made from clay, imbued with life by men with special powers.

 

My use of the title points two ways.  It points outwards, to the material I use – to the clay forms, which are changing all the time and never seem finished.  And it points inwards, back to myself.  I am an ‘unfinished substance’: in a constant state of flux, change, and reinvention.

 

I want to feel okay about being unfinished, instead of feeling like I need to have everything worked out and sorted.  I want to accept that things change, that the future is unknown, and that life is messy.  This is the central issue with which I wrestle on a psychological level.  What I am working with when I am improvising with my material is not separate from how I’m looking at living my life.

 

Is it the same performance every day?

 

No, it is different every day, and I describe this as live art, not performance.  It is improvisation – an open-ended investigatory process, in which I am responding to impulses that occur as I go along.  Sometimes this is quite a thoughtful process, and sometimes it’s as if I am letting my body respond viscerally without really thinking about it.  It can change from one to the other in a moment.

 

In live improvisation neither the audience nor I quite know what is coming next.  So I see this as a shared experience – we are experiencing the unfolding of the moment, together. 

 

Can you see out at all?

 

No, I can’t see out.  Not being able to see makes me more attuned to touch, and the feel of my own limbs and torso as they move about.  Being ‘blind’ means I have a haptic engagement with my material rather than a visual one: I experience the material through my bodily sensations, and create art from an embodied place.  It also means I’m less likely to get bogged down with my tendency to try to make artworks look right.

 

How do you breathe when you've got clay on your head?

 

Sometimes I use semi-hard clay directly on my head, leaving a bit of a gap in front of the mouth.  Sometimes I use a hard plastic hood that I made, or a Russian army gas mask that I bought.  The gas mask is the most difficult one – breathing through this is laboured, and has a nasty taste. 

 

Can you hear anything?

 

When I have clay on my head, and earplugs in my ears, sound is severely muffled.  I may catch odd words that people are saying, or laughter and so on.  I can’t hear full sentences, and I don’t particularly want to either, as I get distracted from what I’m doing.

 

Are you having yourself videoed?

 

No.  I am not interested in making a film/video.  I want this to be a “live” experience, the “live-ness” is extremely important to me.  The problem with making a film is that when people who weren’t there watch footage of an event they think they have seen the event, that they didn’t miss anything.  But they did: they missed the live experience.

 

I am having myself photographed, partly for documentation purposes and partly for my own curiosity.  I feel that photography, by only capturing ‘moments’, does not have the problem with video mentioned above, or at least to nothing like the same extent. 

 

Sometimes viewers wish to video me on their phones, and that feels different to me intentionally making a film; I have no objection to that. 

 

Do you carry on even when nobody is watching?

 

Yes.  I decide beforehand on a certain length of time (2 hours per day in this case), and then keep to that regardless of whether anybody is about.  This is a practice to which I commit myself, not a show that requires a minimum audience.

 

 

Chris Beale

30th May 2015