Today I went to collect storm-wrack and driftwood from the beach, to turn into jewellery and printmaking blocks sometime in the future. It’s good wood: not necessarily good for structural purposes, but beautiful, and meaningful, and its histories matter. Both the ones I know — that it was collected at Stonehaven Bay, after a November storm that left a six-foot berm of uprooted kelp on the shore — and the ones I don’t, like where it grew and even what species it is.
This is as good a time as any to start talking about what I call object clouds.
Starting with an example: there’s a jumper hanging in my wardrobe. It’s made of brown wool, and it doesn’t have a label in it. Nobody knows, looking at it, that it was made by my mother from the undyed wool of a sheep named Baa, who belonged to a family friend back in Gwynedd, and who I used to hand-feed whenever she got the chance. That history is all part of its object cloud — but so are the things I don’t know, that nobody knows. What was my mother listening to when she made it? I can make an educated guess that it was Radio 4, and that it wasn’t Women’s Hour or the Archers, but that’s all. What size needles did she use? I can remember what they looked like, but not what the number on them is. A knitter could probably make an educated guess, but I’m not one.
Baa was a Black Welsh Mountain sheep, and they’re hardy enough that they don’t need supplemental feeding. So the jumper is made from biomass originating mostly in that one specific valley near my home village. Was she born around there? Not on that smallholding, probably in a local farmer’s herd. How local? I don’t know.
You can think of all this as a kind of metadata, but only in a fuzzy and imprecise way. That’s why I like the term “object cloud” — it’s a reminder that the limits of our knowledge are quite a lot smaller than the limits of the object’s connections and histories, that everything touches other things in ways we don’t know.
So the fundamental question is, does any of this matter? That all depends on what you want to do with it. I’m a scientist by original inclination, so I like controlling for variables. As an artist, I can push that to a ludicrous extent, and control what the final artwork means to the viewers by presenting the object cloud instead of just the Thing Itself. There’s a lot of controversy there, of course: how much context should you give? Does your artistic practice mean the Thing should speak for Itself, or even that it shouldn’t speak at all? How much is the viewer going to bother reading, anyway?
Does it matter that Van Gogh was in a better mental state when he made his original sketches of Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland than when he painted At Eternity’s Gate?
How much do we believe Beuys’ account of his rescue by Tatars? Did that influence his use of felt and fat, or is it a romantic back-rationalization? Does that matter?
All these things turn a lump of Stuff into a story, a poem in matter.
