MOLLUSCK REFERENCE ︎ COLLAB WITH MAREE HORNER
MOLTEN ENTITIES
NOTES ON MOVING MOUNTAINS
If fossilized nonhuman lives appear as stone, Foucault’s infamous human lives appear as ashes or dried plants and flowers organized in a herbarium as an “anthology of existences.” Fossils emerge as if from the ocean floor in the shape of “ear, or skull, or sexual parts, like so many plaster statues, fashioned one day and dropped the next,” as the cast-off parts of a human; the logic of resemblance peculiar to the fossil recasts those human parts as sea shell, bird, or worm. Foucault’s historically contingent, emergent conception of life forces us to engage with the materiality of the traces of the past through which we construct our present un-derstanding of ourselves, not only as individual disciplinary subjects but, more urgently, in our massification as population and even as a geomorphic force.[1]
Ceramics - a crystaline matrix. Quartz makes up over 50 per cent of the earth’s surface and is the main ingredient in ceramics glazing, with calcium carbonate and feldspar. Basaltic lava usually erupts at 1100-1200 C. Quartz activates after bisque firing clay at around 950 C and vitrifies the glaze to the clay body at around 1200 C. Calcium carbonate is bones. corals, fossils - our divine monuments eventually activating earthquakes and volcanoes. Surface tension - piezoelectric pressure on quartz can also trigger eruptions. Touch and heat activate quartz in communication devices like touchtone screens in mobile phones. It’s crystals vibrating at precise frequencies - transmitting radio and television signals – sometimes without the use of electricity. The third eye - 100 to 300 microcrystals per cubic millimetre were found in each of 20 different human pineal glands, able to transmit into electromagnetic fields, such as those of other brains. We resonate with the frequencies of quartz crystals as every cell in the human body has a geometric crystalline structure. The crystalline prevailing and transforming, molten entities in intimate combustion – echoing ooze of Ammonites to Ammolites – breaking new ground.
[1] Lynne Huffer - Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy, 2015
︎ MOLTEN ENTITIES - NOTES ON MOVING MOUNTAINS exhibited as part of From things flow at RM, Gallery ︎, a group show with Shelley Simpson, Kate van der Drift and Kathryn Tulloch in July 2021.
MOLTEN ENTITIES included a video collab MOLLUSK REFERENCE with Maree Horner and an audio- visual Quartz sound journey witn Cheryl Farthing.
︎ Previous archive DISASTROUSFORMS.COM ︎ is a body of ceramic and clay works explores natural disasters, natural history and archiving. This project was inspired by a field trip to Pompeii with Mark Dion and team, Auckland Museum’s Natural History Collections Online, and created in conversation with curator Dina Jezdic. Navigating our environment as we become ground zero. From volcanoes, corals, and fossils to the quartz in your mobile phone, exploring collections to collective consciousness. As Walter Benjamin observed, collections are never finished.
This was a nomadic month long online exhibition, navigating the city of Auckland and the interwebs, culminating in a special event ︎, March 24 2021. Auckland Live Digital Stage Aotea Square. This project was created in conversation & curatorial collaboration with Dina Jezdic. Her essay A MUSEUM PORTAL FOR A PANDEMIC AESTHETIC ︎ and DISASTROUSFORMS.COM are archived as a topic at Auckland Museum Collections Online. Made with the support of Creative New Zealand and Auckland Live.
