Text, Substance and New Metaphors for Self and Other
This ‘self’ is more like an ‘event’ … for the ‘other’ is within as well as without.
Christine Battersby1
The idea was a machine that would go of itself.
Felix Gilman2
A sculptor who often collaborates with philosophers, Elizabeth Presa is very much at home with densely layered, intuitive thought. Her thinking frequently takes the ancient Greeks’ myths as a starting point, yet she spins primeval archetypes and narratives into material presence, using the text as ‘the logic that drives the work’,3 and as found thought freed from its original context, awaiting her interaction. She reads deeply across a vast range of treatises, literatures and philosophical subjects, crossing cultures and historical eras. However, the sound of footsteps in a museum, the weather, or her relationship with her daughters can be of equal concern to her multi-faceted inquiry. As a speculative poetics combined with unorthodox material research, her installations create ‘a world where we are one of many entities possessing agency, narrative power, philosophical weight and dignity’.4
Presa’s work functions on the cusp of offering nothing and everything—that is, the letting-go-of and re-imagining of self through a free-masonry of association with the non-human. For instance, in Animal Bodies: Echidna / Human (2013) she poured hot brown wax into the ‘moulds’ of empty spaces … enigmatic clumps of dirt encrusted wax … spaces left behind in sand by echidnas’ snouts when they foraged for food. Next to these clumps of dirt encrusted wax she displayed delicate glass casts of clay shapes, which had been squeezed in her fist. She wrote:
Both animal and human forms show something of a primal gesture, proper to the snout... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Beekeeper Clothes, Architecture for Solitary Bees, 2013. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Interior Castle, 2010. Detail. Mixed media, dimensions variable; another / economy, 2014. Courtesy the artist.
