Barrel affordance
“Sitzen fleisch” is an expression my German friend Sandra taught me. I learnt this, she said, when i was writing my PHD. “I had to stick with it, after my curiosity had been used up, I had to stick with it and see it through”, she said.
At a family clean up of an old boat house I found some old barrel material. The curved planks bore traces of old, worn paint, sea washed wood and rusty nails. I was attracted to the beautiful curves, all the same, once put together to create barrels, holding fish or other fishing tools. These planks show material affordance, offering formal possibilities for my creative work, as explained below:
“The concept of affordances roots in the studies of the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who revolutionized the field of perception studies in the 1960s. According to him, “things” naturally inhere affordances. They offer a certain range of possible activities depending on their form, time patterns, and material qualities, thus becoming part of human-thing-interactions.”
I was attracted to how much tradition and history this material held. playing with these geometric forms, I started creating repetitions and patterns, holding the old, yet shaping something new, but without the practical usefulness. In this play, I also discovered space for old glass spheres, used with fish nets to keep it stretched and floating.
By putting the curved barrel planks around, facing each other, the space in between them created enough tension to hold the glass spheres without any fixatives. In this way, the artwork display this once intentional bending of the wood, the negative space becomes an image of this intention, this energy once added to the material.