Ashes to Pigment, Dust to Paint

Transcription

1 AFTER NYNE Bea Haines Ashes to Pigment, Dust to Paint 56

2 I am more curious about the elements that, by being so widespread, are usually for that very reason shielded from view. The voices of dust, the soul of dust, these interest me a lot more than flowers, trees or horses because I take them to be stranger. JEAN DUBUFFET 57

3 AFTER NYNE A few years ago, British artist Bea Haines walked into her local doctor s surgery to be greeted by a machine that fed her a small ticket with a number on. 52. She peered at this number printed on the crisp paper like a parking ticket, and parked herself in the waiting room amongst a dozen others. She had become this number. At some point in our lives, we all encounter a similar scenario, where the sterile environment of a hospital, doctor s surgery, dentist or laboratory does not equate to the emotional gravitas of the situation we are faced with. It is of course essential that these environments remain sterile to avoid bacteria spreading, but it is nonetheless at odds with the personal or delicate reasons we find ourselves in these places. Bea Haines creates artwork that explores relationships between the scientific and emotional. During her recent residency at Griffin Gallery, she worked in collaboration with scientists at Colart s Innovation and Development lab to create a pigment from human ashes. The resulting artwork addresses mortality and breaks down taboos surrounding death. It not only offers a universal account of death, but also a personal one. The ashes are the remains of a deceased relative and sailor, whose native lake and sea water was used as a wash before adding the ash watercolour to produce large lens-like discs on the paper. The Circle form is symbolic of the life cycle, completion and alludes to lenses of the eye, binoculars, spectacles and microscope; tools that the deceased used in life and Bea uses to create. During the residency, Bea also transformed lab equipment into improvised printing presses and drawing machines. A series of animal ash prints created on an electronic muller (pigment mixing machine) explore a diverse array of marks. Each print individual and different from the last, they are reminiscent of fingerprints, brain scans or microorganisms in a petri dish. The lab s Write-Out Tester is a machine that trials the life span of pens. A pen continually draws onto a long ream of paper fed through the machine until there is no ink left. Bea inserted her own ash pigment into a pen which undergoes this test, replaying life in the form of a drawn life line. Although using human remains as a pigment may seem bizarre and even shocking, this was a practice frequently employed by artists in the 16th and 17th centuries. Mummy Brown was a rich brown pigment made from the ground up remains of Egyptian mummies. The ColArt archive houses a small, unassuming pot of this macabre pigment with handwritten text simply stating mummy. This is not the first time Bea has used unusual materials in the creative process. Past artworks have been fashioned out of lime scale, human gall stones, blood and forensic fingerprint powder. The transformation of materials perceived to be mundane or grotesque re-appropriates them and questions perceptions conditioned into us from infancy. There is always a trace left behind, however small; whether it is a fingerprint left on glass, strands of hair or scattered ash. These remnants only disappear with time in the human eye, but they continue to exist within the microcosm, memory and art. Dust forms the ceaseless tides of becoming and dissolution of things. Out of it things are made; into it they dissolve. Joseph A. Amato PREVIOUS PAGE: RIGHT PAGE: COMPLETED HER ARTIST RESIDENCY AT GRIFFIN GALLERY 58

4 Dust forms the ceaseless tides of becoming and dissolution of things. Out of it things are made; into it they dissolve. JOSEPH A. AMATO 59

5 AFTER NYNE ABOVE: 60

6 ABOVE: 61