Essay by Ann Finnegan
2002
Bamboo is a material distinctly associated with Asia, appearing in manifold forms and diverse representations; as elegant motif decorating parasols to keep off the sun, in fencing, housing, plumbing, yokes for carrying water, knotted into brooms, woven into baskets. As material signature it signs a typically exotic origin, conjuring lush green rice paddies, water, buffalo, tropical forests, markets fresh with vegetables and fish. Displacing itself into the traditional activities of everyday life, bamboo is humble material which links everyday acts of sweeping to solemn ceremonies of worship, as in the familiar image of bamboo baskets stacked ornamentally with ritual offerings and balanced on the heads of sarong-clad women on their way to the Hindu temples of Bali. In the cities it might jostle against and compete with plastics, but much of daily activity is still accompanied by the grace of bamboo.
Sue Pedley, after a residency at Lunuganga in Sri Lanka, working in the magnificent grounds of Bawa's house and gardens, returned with a fascination for this material, and the unique properties of strength, lightness, hollowness, and durability which allow it to permeate Asian culture with an intensity and a utility ummatched by the denser materials of wood, flaxes, or metals in European cultures. Asia possesses these materials in abundance, too, but it is the bamboo which insistently signs everyday life rather than the elaborate wood or stone carvings of the temples. Perhaps because bamboo was the distinctive Asian material, Pedley fell for its expressive qualities. Bamboo was, for her, the stuff of the streets, at the intersection of craft and art.
Pedley has based much of her artistic practice on acts of making and the materiality of different kinds of matter. A body of her early work was devoted to exploring the absorption rate of pigments into plaster and gypsum [Humidity]. The physical and chemical properties of gypsum and other relatives of the calcium carbonate family led her to investigate quarry sites, to trace the material back to the source. Historical attributes, as in histories of use and making, interest Pedley as another layer unfolding from the properties of matter. The accumulating of layers of history, in and outside of the human or social histories of the use of materials, are often invested back into her works. The pigment and plaster works carry with them a history of human making even when taken back by Pedley to a primitive state of quarried gypsum left to react to her acts of applying dye, which then worked its way through the material, always towards the surface with variable intensities of hue. Pedley lets the phsyical properties of the material - in the case of gypsum, its water-drawing qualities - enter into and complete her work.
Therefore, when Pedley commenced her residencies in Asia, her instinct for intrinsic material quality led her to bamboo and a different set of properties as they related to human utility and acts of making. If her earlier work with gypsum and plaster tangentially recalled an element of the grand art history of noble frescoes, her passion and affinity were more with lumps of plaster left over in workmen's buckets in more prosaic housing. It was the stuff of matter which impressed her; plaster being this malleable goop with a splendid penchant for the uptake of pigments. Pedley preferred to install in a shopfront, or direct in a gallery, to set her plaster into the cracks and lines in the floor, before colouring and breaking them up, so that the works retained a sense of place and of making [Stains, Frescoes III Riverbed, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1994; under the pier, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 1996].
Bamboo, while sharing none of the properties of plaster, was stamped with the signature of Asia as a place, and manifested in a multitude of small, domestic acts of daily making, more akin to craft. It should be noted that Pedly has a history of investigating the ramifications of often unnoticed domestic acts. She'd baked scones and left them to decay as a local protest of the closing of the local Erskineville Post Office, in her hometown of Sydney letting the matter of all those baked scones accumulate into the physical mass of projected objections ["Listening to Clara, Ethel and Ada". Perspecta 1980, Beyond Art and Nature. In other installations, she's stitched, knitted and woven various materials together, often working with wool, and, in the outback, in combination with native grasses. Pedley works close to material nature, organic and inorganic, and seemingly very close to the arty artlessness of craft. However, on further inspection, her studies in stitched materiality are less craft-based in aim than expressive of the more abstract holding together of different materialies. At the simplest level of sewing thick plyed wool into fabric, it's almost as if the focus is on the act of piercing and pulling, as a kind of ritual passage, which configures a new relation of matter. She doesn't actually make anything in the recognisable sense of creating objects for use. Rather she manifests acts of making on the subliminal plane of a mysterious holding together of forces, with the most mundane of matters.
Red wool loosely knitted over a clump of spinifex reconfigures a spinifex form by that strange act of knotting which is knitting without any major kind of imposition [in collaboration with Pam Lofts, Alics Springs, 1999]. The act of making is slight, barely an example of knitting as craft, and yet the intervention, which is all her knitting can possibly amount to, is enough to put two materialities in collision and confirm that an act of making has transformed mere grass into art. It's as if she had slowed down the speed of the wind in the grass to a kind of formed and coloured inertia. The spinifex wasn't going to blow out of shape, to shake itself out. As with the pigment in the gypsum chunks, ratios of speed and slowness, which Deleuze and Guattari termed haecceties, come to be determined through the work. And this differential of speeds, or of rates of slowness, manifests when different strata of materials come into contact with each other.
The strata to which Deleuze and Guattari refer (A Thousand Plateaux) are not necessarily geological, though it's curious that Pedley began with gypsum and plaster and investigated them as strata or layers of matter in the earth. A strata, in Deleuzian terms, is a plane of consistency. One can easily speak of wool or bamboo as strata having a material consistency. And the strata do not have to stand still, but can displace, or be displaced, to enter into contact with other strata: plaster with brilliant pigment, wool with grass or bamboo. Such contacts often come trailing acts of human intervention or making.
There's thus a kind of Zen-like or abstract quality to Pedley's works. Certainly, she's an actant, occasioning the coming together of material contact, but it's achieved with such a lightness of touch, it's as if she's withdrawn in order to let the collision of the different planes of consistency to do their own work.
Take the first phase of her most recent installation, The Sound of Bamboo, at Sydney's Royal Botanical Gardens. Sections of a magnificent stand of old and graffiti-covered bamboo, overlooking the spectacle of the harbour and the gardens, was temporarily sheathed with the material contrast of short lengths of red and orange wool fabric, blanket-stitched on,high-up at flag reach. These randomly selected strands of bamboo (there is no purpose to the addition of these brightly coloured woolen sheaths) were effectively put into contact with another plane of material consistency. The smooth of the dark green bamboo was snug against the texture of the less durable materiality of the wool, recalling Tibetan contrasts of ancient stone and worn prayer cloths, the latter rubbing to tatters under the agency of the wind, at a faster rate of wearing away than the stone. In Pedley's piece, time is doubly invoked: the graffiti time of the carvings into the bamboo; the consistency of the two materials, bamboo and wood, enduring at different speeds.
Further down, in the gardens near the ponds by the tearooms, the bases of two other tall stands of bamboo had been interwoven with a fine catscradle of bright red wool. Nature wasn't exactly harnessed, or even aesthetically tamed, though at first glance there's a play of scale in which the impressive height and bulk of the bamboo had been gathered into the sight gag of a bouquet. What impressed more was the focus on the power of holding: the fine catscradle holding its pattern around the form without applying force. Pedley's wool served as a marker for the holding power of the natural formation within the strength of the bamboo. Once again the viewer was led to explore different consistencies and strengths of material nature within an assemblage of matters.
The inherent force of bamboo, its thrust and anchoring, is effectively released by placing the more fragile materiality of wool alongside. At the same time, the patterning of the woollen catscradle also cues the viewer into reflecting on the underground rhizomic pattern through which the bamboo draws its power of holding form.
By the time that the viewer has contemplated these two works of wool and bamboo, there's the realization that's it's not particulalry the form which has been aesthetically enhanced (though that has happened too) but that the viewer has been drawn into a meditation on the inherent properties of material substance of bamboo. Why wool and bamboo? There's no metaphoric message; no particular making or shaping of a product, just two contrasting materialies, two contrasting substances. Wool, in its ability, to take up the brilliance of dye; bamboo as a durable substance for carving; for stength. You're led into a meditation of the inherent properties of susbstances, of use and social value, at the same time as the bamboo is performing its aesthetic duty of decoration, as an exotic, in the botanical gardens.
In The Sound Of Lotus, the next phase of this trilogy or tryptich, at Mori gallery, Pedley has installed cyanotypes of humble, everyday objects made of natural materials. There's the perfect shadow outline of the knotting of a broom, the negative imprint of swatches of matting and netting. Woven and crafted matter is in the process of wearing out in everyday use. The cyanotype process simply registers the passage of the light. If an object blocks the rays of the sun, that part of the cyanotype will stay pale and underdeveloped, while the rest of the paper will turn a characteristic deep blue. In these monotone works there's no need to know the colour of the objects in these shadowy prints. The somewhat paradoxical deep blue registering the intensity of the fall of light, the most etherial of material, substances contrasts with the whited out material intensity of woven stuff. Once again, as with the pigment rising through chalk, Pedley lets time be traced through a differential established between planes of consistency.
The cyanotype paper responds more quickly to the flow of time, and literally records the shadow of time falling onto humble materials of vegetative origin. The work reminds one of use, utility and of being used up. The craft of making takes on a metaphysical dimension which is the time of being, of what it is to dwell and endure in the period on earth. Material consistency and the geological time of strata thus open to an abstract plane of thought.
The third phase of Pedley's trilogy, at Gallery 4A, also named The Sound of Bamboo, resulted from a colloboration with composer/musician, Boyd. Again two planes of consistency were coupled, in this instance, those of bamboo and sound. Massive poles of bamboo were slung horizontally off the ground at ear or shoulder height. Through the hollow tubes the sounds of everyday life were piped. Pedley taped conversations (on the topic of bamboo), market sounds, the clicks of weaving on looms, and traffic, an aural journey linked by the onmipresent bamboo now delivering sound as it would deliver water to a pool.
Taken together, bamboo and its cognates displace through all three parts of Pedley's trilogy, as substance which doesn't stand still, but which, rather, circulates and delivers. Displacement, also known as metonymy in psychoanalytic practice, describes the process in which one thing follows upon another, linked in a series of contiguity or horizontal planes. There's none of the vertical stacking in metaphor in which one thing represents or stands in the place of another to give a new signification. Displacement is a chain of susbstitions, one thing after another, link after link, thirsting for life. Displacement has, therefore, been described as the trope of desire or enjoyment, seeking pleasure link after link. Pedley's bamboo effectively travels. One aspect after another is explored, following the bamboo trail as itl unfolds to lead the viewer into a multitude of dimensions of strata and of life as lived.
As a title, The Sound of Bamboo encourages one to follow, as one follows a sound, along a chain of displacements. Certainly, there's the literal connotation of the evident sound of bamboo as you stand in the grove on a hot day with little breeze, in the botanical gardens. However, by the third and final phase of the trilogy, the sound of bamboo has become infused with the life of the city in which this material has permeated. The bamboo has become a pipeline, a conduit, its properties or material consistency displaced into utility.
In a conversation with Anne Ferran, Pedley once said "the zone where two environments meet is the one which supports the most life."1 Hence Pedley's work is full of collisions of different planes of consistency - natural plane/ cultural plane, material plane/ plane of work and craft. In Deleuzian terms, she's in Spinozist tradition of materialist philosophers, entering deeply into investigations of matter as they unfold to the spirit. Spinoza was a lens-maker who understood the connections between matter, craft and thinking. One could speculate that grinding lenses led him to the contemplations which evolved into a materialist philosophy of the inherent relations between things. The more you go into the matter of making, the more deeply you experience the making that is life. As such Pedley never underestimates the inherent power of revelation in myriad small domestic acts.
1. Anne Ferran, In the Air/On the Ground. Sue Pedley: Listening to Clara, Ethel and Ada. Eyeline 35, 18.
2002
Bamboo is a material distinctly associated with Asia, appearing in manifold forms and diverse representations; as elegant motif decorating parasols to keep off the sun, in fencing, housing, plumbing, yokes for carrying water, knotted into brooms, woven into baskets. As material signature it signs a typically exotic origin, conjuring lush green rice paddies, water, buffalo, tropical forests, markets fresh with vegetables and fish. Displacing itself into the traditional activities of everyday life, bamboo is humble material which links everyday acts of sweeping to solemn ceremonies of worship, as in the familiar image of bamboo baskets stacked ornamentally with ritual offerings and balanced on the heads of sarong-clad women on their way to the Hindu temples of Bali. In the cities it might jostle against and compete with plastics, but much of daily activity is still accompanied by the grace of bamboo.
Sue Pedley, after a residency at Lunuganga in Sri Lanka, working in the magnificent grounds of Bawa's house and gardens, returned with a fascination for this material, and the unique properties of strength, lightness, hollowness, and durability which allow it to permeate Asian culture with an intensity and a utility ummatched by the denser materials of wood, flaxes, or metals in European cultures. Asia possesses these materials in abundance, too, but it is the bamboo which insistently signs everyday life rather than the elaborate wood or stone carvings of the temples. Perhaps because bamboo was the distinctive Asian material, Pedley fell for its expressive qualities. Bamboo was, for her, the stuff of the streets, at the intersection of craft and art.
Pedley has based much of her artistic practice on acts of making and the materiality of different kinds of matter. A body of her early work was devoted to exploring the absorption rate of pigments into plaster and gypsum [Humidity]. The physical and chemical properties of gypsum and other relatives of the calcium carbonate family led her to investigate quarry sites, to trace the material back to the source. Historical attributes, as in histories of use and making, interest Pedley as another layer unfolding from the properties of matter. The accumulating of layers of history, in and outside of the human or social histories of the use of materials, are often invested back into her works. The pigment and plaster works carry with them a history of human making even when taken back by Pedley to a primitive state of quarried gypsum left to react to her acts of applying dye, which then worked its way through the material, always towards the surface with variable intensities of hue. Pedley lets the phsyical properties of the material - in the case of gypsum, its water-drawing qualities - enter into and complete her work.
Therefore, when Pedley commenced her residencies in Asia, her instinct for intrinsic material quality led her to bamboo and a different set of properties as they related to human utility and acts of making. If her earlier work with gypsum and plaster tangentially recalled an element of the grand art history of noble frescoes, her passion and affinity were more with lumps of plaster left over in workmen's buckets in more prosaic housing. It was the stuff of matter which impressed her; plaster being this malleable goop with a splendid penchant for the uptake of pigments. Pedley preferred to install in a shopfront, or direct in a gallery, to set her plaster into the cracks and lines in the floor, before colouring and breaking them up, so that the works retained a sense of place and of making [Stains, Frescoes III Riverbed, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1994; under the pier, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 1996].
Bamboo, while sharing none of the properties of plaster, was stamped with the signature of Asia as a place, and manifested in a multitude of small, domestic acts of daily making, more akin to craft. It should be noted that Pedly has a history of investigating the ramifications of often unnoticed domestic acts. She'd baked scones and left them to decay as a local protest of the closing of the local Erskineville Post Office, in her hometown of Sydney letting the matter of all those baked scones accumulate into the physical mass of projected objections ["Listening to Clara, Ethel and Ada". Perspecta 1980, Beyond Art and Nature. In other installations, she's stitched, knitted and woven various materials together, often working with wool, and, in the outback, in combination with native grasses. Pedley works close to material nature, organic and inorganic, and seemingly very close to the arty artlessness of craft. However, on further inspection, her studies in stitched materiality are less craft-based in aim than expressive of the more abstract holding together of different materialies. At the simplest level of sewing thick plyed wool into fabric, it's almost as if the focus is on the act of piercing and pulling, as a kind of ritual passage, which configures a new relation of matter. She doesn't actually make anything in the recognisable sense of creating objects for use. Rather she manifests acts of making on the subliminal plane of a mysterious holding together of forces, with the most mundane of matters.
Red wool loosely knitted over a clump of spinifex reconfigures a spinifex form by that strange act of knotting which is knitting without any major kind of imposition [in collaboration with Pam Lofts, Alics Springs, 1999]. The act of making is slight, barely an example of knitting as craft, and yet the intervention, which is all her knitting can possibly amount to, is enough to put two materialities in collision and confirm that an act of making has transformed mere grass into art. It's as if she had slowed down the speed of the wind in the grass to a kind of formed and coloured inertia. The spinifex wasn't going to blow out of shape, to shake itself out. As with the pigment in the gypsum chunks, ratios of speed and slowness, which Deleuze and Guattari termed haecceties, come to be determined through the work. And this differential of speeds, or of rates of slowness, manifests when different strata of materials come into contact with each other.
The strata to which Deleuze and Guattari refer (A Thousand Plateaux) are not necessarily geological, though it's curious that Pedley began with gypsum and plaster and investigated them as strata or layers of matter in the earth. A strata, in Deleuzian terms, is a plane of consistency. One can easily speak of wool or bamboo as strata having a material consistency. And the strata do not have to stand still, but can displace, or be displaced, to enter into contact with other strata: plaster with brilliant pigment, wool with grass or bamboo. Such contacts often come trailing acts of human intervention or making.
There's thus a kind of Zen-like or abstract quality to Pedley's works. Certainly, she's an actant, occasioning the coming together of material contact, but it's achieved with such a lightness of touch, it's as if she's withdrawn in order to let the collision of the different planes of consistency to do their own work.
Take the first phase of her most recent installation, The Sound of Bamboo, at Sydney's Royal Botanical Gardens. Sections of a magnificent stand of old and graffiti-covered bamboo, overlooking the spectacle of the harbour and the gardens, was temporarily sheathed with the material contrast of short lengths of red and orange wool fabric, blanket-stitched on,high-up at flag reach. These randomly selected strands of bamboo (there is no purpose to the addition of these brightly coloured woolen sheaths) were effectively put into contact with another plane of material consistency. The smooth of the dark green bamboo was snug against the texture of the less durable materiality of the wool, recalling Tibetan contrasts of ancient stone and worn prayer cloths, the latter rubbing to tatters under the agency of the wind, at a faster rate of wearing away than the stone. In Pedley's piece, time is doubly invoked: the graffiti time of the carvings into the bamboo; the consistency of the two materials, bamboo and wood, enduring at different speeds.
Further down, in the gardens near the ponds by the tearooms, the bases of two other tall stands of bamboo had been interwoven with a fine catscradle of bright red wool. Nature wasn't exactly harnessed, or even aesthetically tamed, though at first glance there's a play of scale in which the impressive height and bulk of the bamboo had been gathered into the sight gag of a bouquet. What impressed more was the focus on the power of holding: the fine catscradle holding its pattern around the form without applying force. Pedley's wool served as a marker for the holding power of the natural formation within the strength of the bamboo. Once again the viewer was led to explore different consistencies and strengths of material nature within an assemblage of matters.
The inherent force of bamboo, its thrust and anchoring, is effectively released by placing the more fragile materiality of wool alongside. At the same time, the patterning of the woollen catscradle also cues the viewer into reflecting on the underground rhizomic pattern through which the bamboo draws its power of holding form.
By the time that the viewer has contemplated these two works of wool and bamboo, there's the realization that's it's not particulalry the form which has been aesthetically enhanced (though that has happened too) but that the viewer has been drawn into a meditation on the inherent properties of material substance of bamboo. Why wool and bamboo? There's no metaphoric message; no particular making or shaping of a product, just two contrasting materialies, two contrasting substances. Wool, in its ability, to take up the brilliance of dye; bamboo as a durable substance for carving; for stength. You're led into a meditation of the inherent properties of susbstances, of use and social value, at the same time as the bamboo is performing its aesthetic duty of decoration, as an exotic, in the botanical gardens.
In The Sound Of Lotus, the next phase of this trilogy or tryptich, at Mori gallery, Pedley has installed cyanotypes of humble, everyday objects made of natural materials. There's the perfect shadow outline of the knotting of a broom, the negative imprint of swatches of matting and netting. Woven and crafted matter is in the process of wearing out in everyday use. The cyanotype process simply registers the passage of the light. If an object blocks the rays of the sun, that part of the cyanotype will stay pale and underdeveloped, while the rest of the paper will turn a characteristic deep blue. In these monotone works there's no need to know the colour of the objects in these shadowy prints. The somewhat paradoxical deep blue registering the intensity of the fall of light, the most etherial of material, substances contrasts with the whited out material intensity of woven stuff. Once again, as with the pigment rising through chalk, Pedley lets time be traced through a differential established between planes of consistency.
The cyanotype paper responds more quickly to the flow of time, and literally records the shadow of time falling onto humble materials of vegetative origin. The work reminds one of use, utility and of being used up. The craft of making takes on a metaphysical dimension which is the time of being, of what it is to dwell and endure in the period on earth. Material consistency and the geological time of strata thus open to an abstract plane of thought.
The third phase of Pedley's trilogy, at Gallery 4A, also named The Sound of Bamboo, resulted from a colloboration with composer/musician, Boyd. Again two planes of consistency were coupled, in this instance, those of bamboo and sound. Massive poles of bamboo were slung horizontally off the ground at ear or shoulder height. Through the hollow tubes the sounds of everyday life were piped. Pedley taped conversations (on the topic of bamboo), market sounds, the clicks of weaving on looms, and traffic, an aural journey linked by the onmipresent bamboo now delivering sound as it would deliver water to a pool.
Taken together, bamboo and its cognates displace through all three parts of Pedley's trilogy, as substance which doesn't stand still, but which, rather, circulates and delivers. Displacement, also known as metonymy in psychoanalytic practice, describes the process in which one thing follows upon another, linked in a series of contiguity or horizontal planes. There's none of the vertical stacking in metaphor in which one thing represents or stands in the place of another to give a new signification. Displacement is a chain of susbstitions, one thing after another, link after link, thirsting for life. Displacement has, therefore, been described as the trope of desire or enjoyment, seeking pleasure link after link. Pedley's bamboo effectively travels. One aspect after another is explored, following the bamboo trail as itl unfolds to lead the viewer into a multitude of dimensions of strata and of life as lived.
As a title, The Sound of Bamboo encourages one to follow, as one follows a sound, along a chain of displacements. Certainly, there's the literal connotation of the evident sound of bamboo as you stand in the grove on a hot day with little breeze, in the botanical gardens. However, by the third and final phase of the trilogy, the sound of bamboo has become infused with the life of the city in which this material has permeated. The bamboo has become a pipeline, a conduit, its properties or material consistency displaced into utility.
In a conversation with Anne Ferran, Pedley once said "the zone where two environments meet is the one which supports the most life."1 Hence Pedley's work is full of collisions of different planes of consistency - natural plane/ cultural plane, material plane/ plane of work and craft. In Deleuzian terms, she's in Spinozist tradition of materialist philosophers, entering deeply into investigations of matter as they unfold to the spirit. Spinoza was a lens-maker who understood the connections between matter, craft and thinking. One could speculate that grinding lenses led him to the contemplations which evolved into a materialist philosophy of the inherent relations between things. The more you go into the matter of making, the more deeply you experience the making that is life. As such Pedley never underestimates the inherent power of revelation in myriad small domestic acts.
1. Anne Ferran, In the Air/On the Ground. Sue Pedley: Listening to Clara, Ethel and Ada. Eyeline 35, 18.
