As I have continued to create sculptural products that are meant to address philosophical questions, I am seeing how my work may contribute to important contemporary conversations in my own fields and new discourse in other disciplines.
The conceptual art movement gained momentum in the 20th century, and the focuses of participating artists can be generalized as creating art objects not with the explicit goal of creating aesthetic beauty, but rather as leveraging aesthetic qualities of material and form to communicate an idea. In contemporary art, this movement has massive importance, as many academic artists have a conceptual goal that motivates their practice.
Combining this idea-focused ethos with my philosophical interests has allowed me to take this conceptual purpose of artwork to the extreme: I create my sculptures with the intention of them functioning as, in some ways, a more conceptually complete version of the essay. Objects cannot function as anything other than themselves, and it is much easier to generate falsehoods through text than material. The flatness of a painted fantastical scene reveals its fallacy immediately, as a traditional example. The subjective and intangible nature of language is capable of logical weaknesses that physical matter is not.
My most recent work, titled System Sampler I, is an example of this thesis. It is a sculpture that uses the language of embroidery materials and other textile methods to communicate some of my initial ideas about definitional characteristics of a system (exploring the metaphysical implications of analyzing the universe as being entirely composed of systems and subsystems is my current philosophical focus). I subvert the concept of a definition by creating one that has both textual and material components. The sectioning of the piece is a reference to a textile sampler, which is a single cloth that has small and simple representations of patterns that can be made more complex through repetition and change of scale. This aspect of a sampler is similar to a definition: they both embody simple parts of a consistent pattern that can be applied across different circumstances.
Here is a transcription of the handwritten sections:
Separate parts interact with one another to form new wholes.
Intended perfect patterns become altered in reality by circumstance (surrounding systems).
The presence of physical and informational components which are defined by each other iteratively.
Capable of being useful to and a part of other systems.
Each textual block has one or more physical elements to accompany it that is a physical instance of the characteristic’s occurrence. The section about intended perfection: the outline of the hoop, meant to be a circle but warped in time; and a linear arrangement of strings whose stopping point is the presence of an irregular piece of rusted metal. Physical and informational components: a scaled-up weaving pattern, meant to demonstrate the informational role of numerical values in determining whether or not the fabric holds together and the physical limitations of matter that necessitate the informational patterns of over and under, left and right, etc. Capable of being useful to other systems: a darned hole in the fabric to show that one weaving can heal another; and a taped label of the title of this work as a reminder that the artwork itself is a part of larger systems, like my body of work or our class. Separate parts form new wholes: melted metal that became fused to the structural hoop at some point, adorned with the copper thread that holds the other elements of the piece together.
The conversation about employing materials to represent ideas has existed in the artistic discipline for over a century, but a further conversation that might emerge from my work is what this method of material use might offer to other disciplines; in my case, specifically, philosophy. Textual communication is essential for its specificity and clarity. However, this specificity may be inadequate in the pursuit of complete theories of the universe. More than even a productive creative practice for academics, I posit that the product and process of the sculptural mode may be capable of becoming a means of discourse and proof.
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