Umbilical Cords
Umbilical Cords
Materials: Plaster, natural clay and earth, sand, ground, manufactured clay, scrim.
Dimensions: Variable; Small pieces 40x40 approx. maximum,
15x10cm minimum.Large piece: 45x80cm.
Umbilical cords are a series of small personal artefacts.
Contrary to our familiar baptismal vessels, placed in the church and used for the baptismal ceremony of babies, these artefacts are created for a single use of one person.
They are baptismal fonts; vessels that maintain the soul. Each of them contains a different one.
During the procedure of placement of human into this object, a new relationship is being created; a relation which continues to evolve till the end of its life.
The exchange is mutual.
Created from natural materials like sand, clay and ground, these fonts present our distinct personalities, which begin to formulate from our early stage of life.
The Font becomes the ‘home’ of the soul, an imaginative ‘topos’, a utopia, that revolves into eternal time.
These fonts are still connected to their womb; the earth, thus their placement on the ground.
They are similar in their outfit but indifferent in their interior, just like human nature.
However, all in relation to the other, nothing remains unaffected by its environment.
Symmetrically aligned to each font lays its pre-containing material, as a proof of the preparatory procedure or evidence of their diverse ingredient.
This work took part in a one-day ‘kitchen-exhibition’, The Interval, held within the Undercroft of The Pepperpot.It is an iconic building nestled within the historic market town of Godalming in Surrey.It is a fantastic pop-up art exhibition focusing on the role of time in the kitchen space.
Due to be held on Wednesday the 29th November, Interval takes the role of Michel Foucault’s Kitchen Heterotopia and explores the transition from one space into another, conveying multiple meaning, combining the element of time in relation to the kitchen and the process of making.
The Umbilical cords and the environment they create, are centrally translocated into the everyday setting of a house; the kitchen.
A ‘home’ in a house, a co-existence of an emotional space into the physical one. The omphalos of the world into the centre’ of the house, similarly to the traditional Persian gardens, which included in their centre a fountain; an imaginative centre of the world.
In progress of this work, I aim to create another type of similar objects, which would associate with people and friend from my close environment.
According to each personality - fragility, energy, vigour, passion, calmness, e.t.c - and initial material collected, there will derive the shape, size and materiality of the font.
The items I am given require the person to have attained a close relationship with its materiality and represent him/her in some way.
Till present, I have collected hair, gravel, sugar, wax, paper which will provide the initial form to cast in material like copper, bronze, aluminium, plaster, raisin, wax or rubber.
Discussion on preferences and ideas will determine the shape, mass, weight, volume or colour of the object to come.
Thoughts of casting the form of branches of trees, roots or other possible natural materials with a distinctive appearance, sort of distorted and reformed will also be materialized.
Below, the stages of the work in the studio.
