New Refinement
The following text is a short introductory essay I wrote for the Willow Project Publication (limited edition published by Partus Press and edited by Tinna Gunnarsdottir). The text reflects on similarities between current approaches to materials and resources in Contemporary Design in Iceland and relevant historical precedents in Art, Botany and Geology.
Image 1: Material Experiments form The Willow Project
‘A refinement based on all the matter that has been discarded by the technological ideal seems to be taking place’ (Robert Smithson).
Environmental science tells us that everything we put out into the world will sooner or later decompose and become sediment returned into the crust of the Earth, crystallised in the ice of the Antarctic, or ingested by some future life form. We feel the urgency to minimise waste and to separate the contaminated matter into toxic and non toxic elements. This responsibility has a huge impact on all fields of human activity, from industry to philosophy, and design. It also gives a new aura to the practices of de-composing matter.
The Raw and the Refined
In the recessing industrial paradigm, we excavated the earth strata to find minerals and metals. We mined the land and sea for oil and coal. We refined and purified this raw matter with the help of technological tools such as smelters to separate pure and impure elements, and chemistry to synthesise new compounds. The outcome of these processes became building materials and energy sources for our cities and material productions. This industrial refinement process has established an invisible hierarchy within matter: raw/refined, pure/impure, resources/waste.
‘the refined paints of the studio, the refined metals of the laboratory exist within an ideal system. Such enclosed pure (industrial) systems make it impossible to perceive any other kinds of processes than the ones of differentiated technology.’ (Robert Smithson)
To reverse this hidden hierarchy of materials, Smithson started exhibiting raw minerals collected from industrial quarries in New Jersey. In his Non-Sites installations, he brought limestone rocks, pools of tar and gravel, sandstone and dead trees in their raw state back into our field of aesthetic experience. However, turning away from industrial materials and processes does not imply that matter should not be transformed. On the contrary, Smithson calls for a radical poetics of de-composition and transformation:
‘Oxidation, hydration, carbonisation, and solution (the major processes of rock and mineral disintegration) are four methods that could be turned towards the making of art’ .
To what end are the designers involved in the Willow Project in Iceland applying this artistic refinement to discarded resources? What are the resulting fragments of material telling us?
In his personal essay Was ist Los?, Seth Price describes a piece of ‘petrified lightning’ exhibited in a museum vitrine:
‘The exhibit (of the fragment) stands for the operation in which a scientific process is mystified, replaced by a ruin under glass, making a fetish of waste.’
This critic of fetishisation applies to museum simulacra. Its reach could be extended to a growing trend in contemporary design projects, where uncommon materials and scientific processes are ‘mystified’ to create more exclusive objects.
The resistance to a final objectification of the refinement processes used in the Willow Project invites us to other modes of appreciation, and points to different poetics of design work. In the series of materials created from willow, everything is presented as equally valuable and nothing is awarded higher status of refinement. What do we perceive? There are more or less granular compounds; the cellulose fibres of the paper vary in density depending on the bark layers, similar patterns of veins and cracks run through the coal as through the condensed water. In noticing these minute similarities and differences, we create our own dialogue with the materials. All our senses are mobilised to organise this obscure alphabet of textures, colours, and essences. Experiencing such journeys of material processes, like encountering a work of Land Art, connects us back to the geological time streams, the time of slow sedimentation and material cycles. This experience refines our own perception of matter and time.
Image 2: plate from the book Palm Trees of the Amazons and Their Uses by by Alfred Russell Wallace (1853)
Plant Blindness
In epistemological terms, the observational (quasi-obsessive) approach of the Willow Project to its material bares many similarities to 19th century natural sciences methods . In an epic effort to catalogue natural processes, natural scientists were inventing new ways to observe matter and turning their curious gaze onto new phenomena.
The idea of dedicating a book to one single tree species for example can be dated back to the work of botanist Alfred Russel Wallace. Palm Tree of the Amazons and Their Uses, published by Wallace in 1853, is the first monography ever written about one single species of tree. The scientist confessed that the greatest difficulty in the process of making this book was his own incapacity to distinguish between the thirty-six different types of palm species growing at the time in the Amazon. To overcome this ‘plant blindness’, the scientist turned to the traditional knowledge of the local people. Having used these trees for centuries, their eyes were refined enough to see the small differences within one species.
Designer’s appetite for readily available materials provided by industry has made us forget the simple act of looking at the world in its diversity and potential. Despite technological advances in photographic equipment and chemical analysis, plant blindness is a condition affecting more and more humans. Observational design processes mediated in a constructive way are a tool to enrich our ways of seeing.
Quiet Catastrophes
Dust and soil are the ultimate state of matter decomposition. In dust, elements are recombined through wind and pressure before slowly turning back into sediment, or enriching the soil for plant growth. Dust or soil is what this willow tree would have become, if its destiny had not been diverged into a design project. We can imagine that fungi and other micro-organisms would eventually have decomposed the tree, and the wind carried some its particulars to other shores.
Microscopist Christian Gottffried Ehrenberg (1795–1876), dedicated a great part of his life to studying the composition of a particular ‘red dust’ deposit found after Sirocco wind storms in the Mediterranean area. Working against the preconception that dust was composed of random elements, the microbiologist made a detailed examination of the corpuscles and minerals in his samples of the red dust. He isolated seventy-three types of corpuscles, which origins could be traced back to sea organisms, the seed of plant migrating, and even to some micro-fragments of meteoric events. Crystals of salts from an Icelandic willow could have found their way into this dust, as he also traced some volcanic extracts from the Laki eruption of 1783 in Iceland.
Closer to home, the documentary film Ice and the Sky, directed by Luc Jaquet, follows the scientific process of the discovery of climate change, one of the greatest challenges of our times. Glaciologist Claude Lorius conducted scientific expeditions to the Antarctic to develop processes of analysis of the continent’s layers of ice. One day, while sipping a glass of whisky on the rocks, Lorius noticed small air bubbles escaping from the ice cubes. Being a diligent scientist, he quickly made a link between this phenomenon and the ‘Ice cores’ he was extracting to date the ice sheets: by counting the molecules of carbon entrapped in air bubbles in the ice of the Antarctic, Lorius could prove that their numbers had been growing exponentially since the Industrial Revolution. Staring at an ice cube led to explanation of climate change.
Ice and the Sky also shows the long-standing denial of a society unable to understand that something so invisible and abstract, something so very small as carbon molecules, could be the sign of a global disaster. The public only finally reacted when the melting of the ice caps and the recession of the glaciers became visible to the naked eye.
Caring for the small changes in matter, transforming raw resources through non-industrial processes, and reading into the micro-stories of its elements, is a pathway to deepen our understanding of the environment in general. In its study of unstable fragments and volatile essences, the Willow Project assumes this scientific ethos.
As narrative design work, it echoes with the myth of Faust : Designers want to know how to shape the elements of matter itself, to reach to essence of the tree. This endless quest for knowledge and process making defines new territories for design, and a new aesthetic experience. The materials emerging from this New Refinement also invite us to imagine different forming processes perhaps closer to the insects or mushrooms shape their environment and recombine matter into sophisticated and ephemeral architectures.
“Objects are new from moment to moment so that one can never touch the same object twice; each object must dissolve and be generated continually momentarily. An object is a harmony between a building up and a tearing down”.
Heraclites, Fragments.
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Reproduce or quote with author’s permission
Copyright Thomas Pausz 2020.
