Pre-encounter-post: thoughts after an experience

A clear and precise elbow bend in an acrylic rod. This hinge point, the apex of the sculpture, is the moment where a cool, heavy cube of white marble finds its balance with the marvelous curve and texture of a helmet shell. The shell itself sits on a triangular plastic riser to better meet the angle traced by the acrylic rod. This system is an entirely new thing, complete with a discernible logic and intent. It is of the natural world but not organic. The shell has been corked with rubber and the acrylic inserted at this juncture—is the rod a conduit? There is certainly a sense that something passes between the two anchors. The system is complete but unending. It has potential.

This sculpture is End to End 2, a 2018 work by Louise Haselton, debuted in a group exhibition at GAGprojects in Adelaide that same year. Conceived for a gallery context—always an important consideration of Haselton’s work, the presentation conditions often highlighting the preternatural appearance of her work—it sits on a sharp white plinth typical of contemporary art furniture but in this instance taking on the mantle of scientific significance. As a sculpture it is indicative of an artist interested in the strange perversity of the coexistence of all things, an artist who marvels at elements we cannot be a part of, at objects and organisms formed by nature or hand, complete with some sort of internal logic, at things that confound. The component parts of End to End 2 are collected, objects and materials gathered intuitively according to an affinity to form or surface, or perceived history. This gleaning of material is the genesis of all Haselton’s work, regardless of what form— paper, installation, textile or sculpture—the end result takes. But in each work there is always something noticeably ‘of the hand’, some intervention—an acute spatial awareness, an alertness to the power to be found in context and gaps. These marks of sculptural construction suggest an artist acting on something far more considered than intuition alone.

Louise Haselton’s work is not scientific but it does stem from a curiosity as to how much we can know—and articulate—about the world around us.

‘In severall places there are great stons standing up straight in ranks, some tuo or three foot thick and 10, 12 and 15 foot high,; It is left by traditione that these wer a sort of man converted into stons by ane Inchanter. Others affirme that they wer sett up in places for devotione but the places where they stand are so far from anie such sort of stons to be seen or found either above or underground that it can not but be admired how they could be carried there.’ [i]

Since Neolithic times, the Callanish Stones have stood overlooking Loch Roag on the west coast of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. In a part of the world that can feel outside of time, these sentinels look not outwards to the Atlantic Ocean but inwards, attending their central monolith. Thirteen stones form its protective circle, with one long avenue of stones leading up to it and several shorter paths similarly marked out. One of the most complete prehistoric sites in the world, Callanish has withstood millennia of ever-changing theories regarding its purpose and use.[ii] Anthropologic and archaeological fragments are sifted through, ordered, deciphered and debated in offices bathed in artificial light. At their physical site of origin, however, you are made aware of something complete but without end, something known but not understood.

The Callanish Stones are not art. Though academics argue over the purpose of their construction, this particular stone circle—like many others found across rural Scotland—seems to have an astronomical intention, the positioning of the stones tracking the moon’s passage over an exact 18.6-year cycle. As scholars have pointed out, however, to function as a calendar there is no need for such imposing scale. Why drag these stones into place? Why persevere with unnecessary weight and arduous construction? There is a general consensus among researchers that the site held some ritual function, that there was a communicative intent in the stones’ selection and placement.[iii] The Bronze Age people who built and used this great stone stage were, it seems, striving to understand the universe they were enthralled by, yet their fascination was not purely scientific. Their assumed rituals signified a desire to commune with the phenomena of the world, to connect with the inexpressable. On the basis of this need for connection, I would argue that although the Callanish Stones are not art, an encounter with them raises parallel sensations of wonder, both at their intent and their making.

Louise Haselton has not laid claim to any reference of standing stones in her work. For me, however, (and, coming from Scotland’s north-east, standing stones are perhaps a less exotic metaphor than they first appear) they elicit the same response as that to Haselton’s work—a fascination with how things came to be, an awareness of being in the presence of something just beyond comprehension, and awe of the fact of their physical and imaginative endurance. These are objects and settings that transcend the practicalities of their construction without obscuring the processes that brought them into being.

The wonder of stone circles predates their existence and instead begins with the impulse to build them, the conversations that lead to it and the almost absurd practicality of their construction. To paraphrase Julian Cope, musician, poet and author on Neolithic culture, ‘what we have to see when we see [a stone circle] is not some casual affair’.[iv] They are the result of hours of conversation, conception and consideration of physical properties. They are composed of stones that have been quarried and discussed and dragged and arranged. Nothing in their construction is happenstance. These hours of work, these discussions and machinations, however, have occurred thousands of years before we as a viewer encounter them, discovering something existent but with an almost palpable history and manifest logic, all of which we feel compelled to unfold in an instant but even after millennia haven’t collectively managed to explain. The facts of construction do not flatten our experience; conversely, taking note of them heightens it, adding more complexity to the conundrum we see in front of us.

The same awareness can be applied to Haselton’s work, and, if we are to consider this idea of the pre-encounter, End to End 2 is a useful point to return to. In its melding of the readymade (the shell, the rubber cork) with the handmade (the heat-worked acrylic, the strategic triangular riser), it is an example of the way in which the artist’s sensibility—her understanding of when and where to intervene—can enliven those inert elements corralled from the world around us. For Haselton, it is a case of noticing, of observing the qualities of each thing that passes into her hands and working out how one might relate to another. It is a collaboration of sorts between artist and materials and it calls through all her work, from her refined etching-like stitches on a utilitarian tape-roll of calico in untitled, 1993, to the spools of thread in suspended animation and encased in sharp acrylic and concrete in untitled, 2016, her installation for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial Magic Object. In each of these examples the material binaries are complementary rather than competing, revealing something of each without condemning the other.

Her tactic in setting up these dialogues is patience. It is Haselton’s nature to sit with her materials until she finds the correct context for them. This tendency differentiates between working with ‘collected’ materials, as she does, and working with ‘found’ materials: it is a matter of consideration. To collect is an act of caring, a deliberate judgement after finding something by chance. Working with collected materials, Haselton takes time to understand their nature. The roughly hewn timber that forms part of her 2018 work End to End 5 was discovered discarded in a studio and was kept in Haselton’s inventory for years before it became the fulcrum for a quivering arc of wire. Its incorporation into this slyly comical work (the wire curve sits solemnly in place until one of the corks capping each end is tapped, setting it trembling, an event completely incongruous with the commonly cool and serious gallery atmosphere) was the consequence of the thoughtful pragmatism with which forms and textures are trialed and experimented with over time. In End to End 5 the raw and unintentionally worked form of the timber offset is heralded, not tamed. Haselton’s aesthetic decisions take into account the inherent qualities of each element, looking not to transform but to expose them as they are, acknowledging their agency.

Of course, our thoughts regarding what may have happened at a site or to a work are prompted by our experience in the present. At Callanish, it is the visible work of an ancient people that suggests a purpose or intent—of which we will never be taken into full confidence—that drives one to wonder why. Haselton’s distinctive ability to transcribe sensation through the pragmatic acts of listening, observing and responding to her materials performs the same spell. Like an encounter with Callanish, while standing in front of Haselton’s work the sensation grows that there is something just beyond us, something before the thing in front of us, or behind it.

The artist has spoken of her fascination with the push and pull between function and aesthetic as well as of objects in which you can see both at once, which accounts for the regular appearance of mirrors, branches and cinder blocks in her material lists. Her egalitarian curiosity can spot this dichotomy in the domestic, the industrial and the naturally occurring, and whatever the original language of use Haselton is an adept translator. In her making she can take the attraction that the peeling, peachy-pink aperture of a helmet shell exerts, for example, and, in building upon it or with it, encode that phenomenon into a new system. This labor enhances our experience of a work like Double Terminator, 2010, its helmet shells with their looping metallic conducts suggesting an attempt to harness or amplify some sub-audible sound. It’s a fanciful idea—after all, the childhood phenomenon of ‘hearing the sea’ inside a shell is simply the amplification of our own blood coursing through our body—but an idea no less potent to our imagination for its collision with reality. The push and pull of function and aesthetic, the known and the unknowable.

Somewhere between the push and the pull lies a balance point, and it is to this that Haselton is innately tuned. Michael Newall raised the matter of balance and movement, interviewing the artist for the catalogue of her 2011 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia:

‘It’s interesting that you ask about balance and movement, I would have referred to balance and stillness! I’m interested to see how still a work can be, which is daft in a way, as the stuff I’m working with is totally inert, the more inert the better really. But maybe the more still a work is, the more movement is close by?’[v]

Here Haselton raises an important point. When we speak of movement in relation to a static object, we are of course speaking of its potential—a kind of stored energy, more potent in stillness. This potential fires the imagination and spins our thoughts off in several directions at once, chasing possibilities and sensing some imminent event. The notional potential of static (or perhaps ‘stilled’ is more correct in this case) objects contrasts with our encounter with them as inanimate, tangible things. It energises and enlivens them; after all, to be still is not necessarily to be lifeless. Composed in all senses of the word, Haselton’s works come across as self-assured or self-reliant, or at the very least self-sustaining.

Self-sustenance brings me to think about equilibrium. Equilibrium is more nuanced than balance; it encompasses not only ideas of parity and equality but also those of natural order, exchange and perpetuity. When considering the work of Louise Haselton, equilibrium becomes an important touchstone. Her understanding of materials in action is in terms of their opposites and juxtapositions, what one lends to another. It manifests as a correspondence of differences, an aesthetic exchange that feeds the creeping idea that something—some force—is running through this thing in front of us. This notion of imperceptible movement makes its stillness even more arresting.

This is all conjecture, and undoubtedly esoteric, but there does lie a more rational consideration of stillness and motion in the art that Haselton produces. Consider another untitled work, this one made in 2018. A square metal frame is anchored at one corner by a thick roll of brown paper, the sort used for packing and parcels, and by a concrete ballast at the other. The top half is clothed in heavy workers’ denim, constructed and fitted so that the sharp corners of the frame remain readable. The bottom support is a relay of marble blocks, varied in size and colour, which almost reads as a register of particle pulses. The way these material components have been set to work has an easy flow, though upon second look they could hardly be more different: cold steel, luxurious marble, workaday cotton. That your eye is drawn fluidly and continually around these forms and textures is not a one-off trick but a distinctive quality of Haselton’s objects. You follow loops, double-backs and logics over, around and through her objects. This might suggest that the elusive movement we can feel so certain of in front of Haselton’s works is in fact that of our own eye or racing thoughts. The objects themselves are as assuredly still as the artist intends. Here again I return to the standing stones, purposefully positioned in counterpoint to the steady movement of celestial bodies above and around them. In their presence, faced with the immovable and very real fact of the monoliths and their presence over millennia, a cognitive space opens in which to consider everything else that continues around them. That space is a moment between the movement that brought the circle into being and the movement that could change it. The moment of stillness. It is where the temporal meets the physical, where the balance point between stillness and movement is a pause.

‘…sculpture is a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing.’[vi]

It is because so little exists in perpetuity that we are fascinated by endurance and find tension in balance. With this in mind, I come back to the statement above by theorist Rosalind Krauss as a distillation of the brilliance of Haselton’s work. By this manner of thinking, hers is exemplary sculpture in the way that it occupies the pause in movement, and particularly in its ability to conjure that moment indefinitely. It is the absolute stillness—the equilibrium—of the objects that Haselton presents us with that permits us to follow the temporal possibilities in any direction. A meeting with her work is a moment in which everything—recognition, wonder, curiosity perhaps—comes rushing at once, a re-making of the world that happens on each encounter.[vii] This is why, for me, a contemporary artist can spark thoughts of ancient ritual sites (despite what may seem a long bow drawn across time and purpose): each is a summoner of experience. Haselton has an uncommon ability to notice and subsequently translate the triggers of these sensations, to articulate that exact moment of cognitive rush. Experience is known before it is understood. Louise Haselton’s power is in her production of synonyms for experience.

[i] This 17th century account is that of Iain mc Mhurch’’cAilein (anglicised as John Morrison), who composed a prose map of Lewis. It has been included in a number of publications but in this instance comes from a 2016 report detailing one of the more complete surveys and excavations of the site, carried out from 1979 until 1988. (Patrick J Ashmore, Calanais Survey and Excavation 1979-88, Historic Environment Scotland, p. 11.)

[ii] In 2016, Patrick J Ashmore, a Principal Inspector of Ancient Monuments with Historic Scotland, digitally published his in-depth analysis Calanais Survey and Excavation 1979-88, which provides insight to the range of opinions on this iconic site (Calanais being the Gaelic spelling). It can be accessed here: https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=b6aee5fd-5980-4872-a2e0-a63c00cc7b68

iii See Patrick J Ashmore, 2016 Calanais Survey and Excavation 1979-88, Historic Environment Scotland, Edinburgh, https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=b6aee5fd-5980-4872-a2e0-a63c00cc7b68

[iv] The eccentric Julian Cope has parallel performance and antiquarian careers, having facilitated his study of ancient sites through the scheduling of his music tours. His book The Modern Antiquarian is now out of print but he maintains an active website for fellow amateur archaeologists and the documentary accompanying the book can be viewed on YouTube. His is a more idiosyncratic but no less engaged perspective than regular academic studies, and is perhaps the most entertaining way to be lead through these remnants of an unknowable past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=falVe_vkejE

[v] Michael Newall, 2011, ‘Extracting Response: Michael Newall in conversation with Louise Haselton’ in Errand Workshop, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc., p.16

[vi] Rosalind Kraus, 1977, ‘Introduction’ in Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press USA, p.4

[vii] The idea of material agency and the remaking of worlds is a central tenant of New Materialism, a way of thinking gaining pace in 21st century philosophical discussion. Jane Bennet’s 2010 publication Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things gives an overview of this approach and in its reading provides food for thought when considering Haselton’s practice: Jane Bennet, 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, North Carolina USA

– Gillian Brown, from Louise Haselton: Act Natural, Wakefield Press, 2019.