SPEED OF TRUST
ROSIE MCLEAN
@ FUSION ARTS
95 GLOUCESTER GREEN
Fri 24TH NOVEMBER- fri 8TH DECEMBER
WEDNESDAY - SUNDAY 11am-6pm
The materiality and associations of glass invite us to attend to the plasticity of our attentions and perceptions, and consider how they might be different. Glass can be melted and reformed indefinitely. We associate it largely with devices that help us “see”, such as windows or lenses, and as a vessel for liquids. It does itself liquify to a viscous syrup at around 1700 degrees celsius.
Solid glass has the ability to slow light down, to bend, and split it up. Much of the English language which pertains to truth and power privileges the visible and is couched in metaphors of light, whilst darkness is often associated with ignorance, emotion and chaos. This problematic othering, where darkness is variously feminised, racialised, or rendered binary, dismisses, minimises, and falsifies the opaque, the invisible, the felt.
The work in this exhibition proposes and affirms diffraction, obscurification, permeability, haptics and the more-than-visual as ways of knowing. Collectively, the exhibition speculates on whether these praxes could be a way of bringing together the pains and joys of relating with the unknowability within ourselves and in others, a way of acknowledging and transmuting the emotional risks we undertake in order to reach for intimacy and connection.
The beaded tapestry piece Counting on Light Relief is a two-year-old work-in-progress made from beads pulled out of a skip, other found objects, textiles and a decorator’s dust-sheet. Formal tensions between harmony and abandon play out between everyday objects, beaded doodles and snippets from the artist’s dreams and memories. It marks a stylistic and contextual departure from the artist’s previous creative work making couture costume and lingerie from handwoven beaded lace in predominantly regular or symmetrical patterns.
The Fire in Glass series is composed of wood, ash, recycled glass, beads and wire. These spectral sculptures begin outdoors during ritual bonfires, echoing rites performed by European agricultural communities in Spring fire festivals prior to the 1800s as described in James George Frazer’s book The Golden Bough. One such tradition involves burning boughs in communal bonfires with song and dance. Villagers are said to scatter the remaining ashes and bury left-over half burnt boughs in fields to invite fertility and to honour the seasonal cycles of destruction and renewal.
During the Fire in Glass rituals, glass is bound to wood, melting and vitrifying in a disorderly and unpredictable heat. Working outdoors without access to an annealing kiln, commonly used for glassmaking, means the cooled work has a high risk of cracking or shattering, a material process that continues to unfold autonomously after the initial firing. In further stages of glass making and breaking, they continue to be re-beaded, re-bound, refired ad infinitum in no particular order.
The Fire in Glass process is informed by the ongoing negotiations and metamorphoses of relational textures. It was conceived during my residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in 2022 and was developed further in collaborative relationships with Nor Greenhalgh and Patrick Mannion, and further expanded with artist and somatic healing practitioner Assia Ghendir to think about how it might morph into a collaborative sound and ritual performance. Collaboration, in art and life, is a vulnerable creative process, and each collaborative relationship is unique, and requires a foundation of trust.
Assia and I spent a week making work with glass, fire, charcoal and voice. We swapped and shared skills via call-and-response and acts of juxtaposition. Some of the glass sculptures and automatic sound drawings from these sessions are exhibited here with a vocal track recorded by Assia remotely in response to photographs of the pieces and memory of the sessions. Not much was documented at the time the sessions took place, a deliberate choice to allow the dialogue to develop at its own pace and allow the works to speak for themselves.
To ‘Move at the Speed of Trust’ is a concept I came across in the work of abolitionist thinker, healer and facilitator adrienne maree brown, and her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds, a book of ‘self-help, society-help, and planet-help’. A footnote in brown’s more recent book Holding Change elucidates the idea as “communications strategist Mervyn Marcano’s remix of Stephen Covey’s ‘speed of trust’ concept”. Stephen Covey authored the self-help classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, an enormously popular book steeped in the writer’s Mormon, colonial capitalist values. His later book The Speed of Trust describes how “trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees, and all stakeholders—is the single most critical component of a successful leader and organization.”
I include these citations to chart the cross-ideological journey of the phrase, to highlight how trust is valued and sought by changemakers across the spectrum. Trust is both enabled by the form of our consent and informs who or what we are likely to consent to (I elaborate on this in the essay which is available as a gallery handout and as audio). Our perceptions and values both create and are created by trust, and change happens when one or more aspects of this circuitry are interrupted. Margaret Thatcher knew this when she said “economics is the method, the object is to change the soul”.
The work in this exhibition invites consideration of the negotiation between choice, will and chance in how we perceive and interact with the world around us. How far will you trust someone or some thing? For how long? For whom or what? How will it ebb and flow? And, perhaps most importantly, why?
Brown, Adrienne. 2021. Holding Change : The Way of Emergent Strategy. Facilitation and Mediation. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press
Brown, Adrienne. 2017. Emergent Strategy. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press.
Frazer, James George, 1854-1941. The Golden Bough; a Study in Magic and Religion. New York : Macmillan Company
Rosie McLean is an artist based between Oxford and London. She makes sculptures and textile works from found, sustainably sourced and repurposed materials. Her personal work is devotional and attends to the liberatory potential of pleasure, dreams and creativity. She makes objects as a way of connecting to people, place and via the ineffable thresholds and contemplative processes of: growing, burning, melting, dyeing, stitching and beading. For the last three years she has been working and thinking with the land, glass, fire, ash,photosensitivity, and concepts arising from the diffraction and transference of knowledge and relationships. She collaborates with creative practitioners across disciplines, such as sound, performance, film, ritual and permaculture and also facilitates creative experiences for others in educational and community arts settings. Website www.rosiemclean.com Instagram @rosie.boat
Assia Ghendir is a musician, performance artist and somatic practitioner whose research-driven practice explores the parallel and dialogue between geological movements and somatic movements. Rooted in ancient vocalizations and rite of passage practices, Assia’s vocal work is a precise attunement through pre-verbal incantations that tells of numinous landscapes, human emotions and its malleability. Instagram @assiaghendir
The work in this exhibition has been developed through impactful dialogues and collaboration with the following people and organisations over a number of years :
Assia Ghendir, Beatrice Brown, Charlotte Grace, Clare Roderick, Dan Macintyre, Daniella Valz Gen, Dot Tiwari, Dunya Kalantery, Ginger Angelica, Growing Solidarity and Hempen Agricultural Co-operative, Joana Nastari, Kieran Cox, Mahmoud Mahdy, Nor Greenhalgh, Patrick Mannion, Samantha Sun, Sam Skinner, Sophe Gale, The East London and Berlin Strippers Collectives, Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani and YWMP, Zoe Williams
Thank you to lighting wizard Paul Jarvo (and to Tim Meadowcroft and Charlie Hope for their advice), and installation genius Danny McNaboe, for your expertise. Thank you to Modern Art Oxford for lending sound equipment, and Alva Orr (www.fishlasers.co.uk) for the additional equipment loan and advice with sound.
I would also like to thank Fusion Arts, Fig Studio, A-N (The Artists Information Company) and Arts Council England for their trust and support with developing the work.
Fusion Arts is a charity based in East Oxford that tackles social disadvantage through artistic practice. They seek to drive social change by connecting artists and communities, supporting people to express themselves creatively. Fusion’s work reaches across Oxfordshire and beyond, including high-profile public events such as Oxford’s Light Festival, Cowley Road Carnival and Oxford Windrush Festival. Fusion also facilitates public artworks such as Oxford’s Covid-19 Stay Safe Murals and the #WindowGalleries. Website: https://www.fusion-arts.org/