Force of Nature
"The texture of the world, it's filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek." Annie Dillard
My Embodied Imagination® teacher recently described my ceramic artifacts as “forces of nature”. I was taken with how he experienced my work that way and wanted to explore it more in this blog.
Forces of nature are literally natural phenomena and a natural phenomenon is an observable event which is not man-made.
Phenomenology is the study of an individual's lived experience of the world and is a tradition I have been apprenticing to for about 14 years. As a phenomenologist my primary way of being in the world is through direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced rather than explanatory or causal.
I am intrigued by Merleau Ponty's notion that rather than art/(ifacts) imitating the world, they are worlds of their own. From this perspective, each ceramic artifact is a world of its own and, to take it one step further, it exists in order to be perceived and is realized only in perception. If we, as its spectators, are its essential witnesses, called upon to con-firm it in its autonomy, then each artifact that comes into existence must be witnessed and has the potential to affect the witness by stirring and evoking an aesthetic response.
The origins of “aesthetic” lead back to the ancient Greek aisthesis. According to psychologist James Hillman, aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.”
I see with new eyes today the importance of art to be witnessed/experienced ~ to be revered as autonomous ~ to be seen as a force of nature with its own animating spirit.
