TransplanT Cecilia Mandrile | Tom McDonagh Sonny Lightfoot | Niamh Fahy
Cecilia Mandrile Tom McDonagh Sonny Lightfoot Niamh Fahy
TransplanT
Foreword by Carinna Parraman
Lorem ipsum
Transplant Impact Press The Centre for Fine Print Research University of the West of England, Bristol, UK June 2020 ISBN 978-1-906501-20-4 Š 2020 images, individual artists Š 2020 texts, individual authors Edition of 200
The Transplant project began long
before the words COVID-19, lockdown, new-normal, or social distancing were thought or uttered in the same sentence. Now as we survey our world and converse with family and friends though computer screens, these terms have become so familiar. We may also gaze at photos of crowded social gatherings or packed railway stations, trains, airports and planes – will we return to these activities in the same way? I am delighted to introduce Cecilia Mandrile’s new project and her collaboration with three practitioners Niamh Fahy, Tom McDonagh and Sonny Lightfoot from the Centre for Fine Print Research, who each bring their own insights, expertise and practice to Transplant. As an artist, Cecilia has continued her practice in a portable, economic and
ingenious way. As she travels, she carries her extended portfolio as a family of dolls and figures in her suitcase, maybe smuggling those in her care across borders, or easing their passage by producing identity cards. For the sorrow dolls yearning to break free she provides notes of introduction, or for some who are old, too young or travel weary, she entrusts them to new homes and adoptive parents. Each ritual is performed with meticulous care. Sonny describes her figures as a lost tribe looking to improve their status. He suggests that through their transformation from common textile to glass, their perceived status is elevated. He describes the process of transformation from fabric to glass and their birth in the fiery womb of the kiln. However, in another way these cast figures have become more fragile, and the potential for damage has increased. Tom’s perspective is of the scientist and
epidemiologist. He interweaves practice with a virtual observation, and of the health of the world, and balances our mental state with the physical need for isolation. Niamh explores the process of transplantation through reconstruction, and records characteristics and details through the Collodion medium of chiaroscuro, or light and shade. ‘O brave new world That has such people in’t!’, each of the characters on Prospero’s island are reborn in The Tempest, are isolated, and one by one are subjected to physical deprivation and mental tortures. In Huxley’s Brave New World, citizens living in a World State are engineered in Hatcheries in artificial wombs, and are entertained and maintained by advanced technological apparatus. In a post COVID-19 world, what might be the new status for the Transplant community? Will they become alphas or epsilons, dukes or pirates?
Image FILE + TACO (WALTER)
Will they remain displaced and nomadic, or restored and adopted, or could they become erased or nurtured? As watchful parents, we await their future and their passage through time. Carinna Parraman, 12th June 2020
William Shakespeare, (1610–1611) The Tempest, Act V, Scene I Aldous Huxley, (1932) Brave New World
The Genealogy of a Doll Cecilia Mandrile
In The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger quotes Degas: ‘One only has one heart’, a heart he dedicated to his life’s oeuvre. Most often, being a visual artist means a solitary attempt to follow our own heart’s pace. But what happens when that heart is transplanted into another body or another landscape—territories of unknown languages and unrecognizable memories? Displacements threaten the stability and continuity of the nature of self, the sense of one’s core has to be redefined, redesigned. Indeed, transplantation refers to the process of taking an organ or living tissue and implanting it in another body, as well as to the movement of someone or something to another place or situation. These processes hold extreme uncertainty, and invite questions about forms of hospitality and collaboration as a vital venture. The making of prints has traditionally involved the displacement
of visual information from a source (plate, file, numeric code) to a range of substrates (paper, canvas, wood, plastic, glass, clay). I believe it is about generating multiple images with new physical identities, each with their own sentient body. In current times when most sensorial interactions are paused through invisible frontiers, and touching is believed to be as a death sentence, print processes remain at the core of creative practices, evidence that the ubiquity of virtual communication coexists with the urge to engage with a tangible outcome. Transplant is a project undertaken by four artists at UWE’s Centre for Fine Print Research that explores the potential of transplantation inherent to print-based practices. Throughout collaborative making, we examine the displacing nature of the imprint and the transitional notion of the printed artefact. The source of the works created as a result of this project is a self-portrait-sorrow doll that has wandered with me for over two decades, translated into ephemeral and resilient
Cecilia image QUITAPENAS 2
substrates via various technical processes and diverse geographies. In 2000, while undertaking my PhD studies at CFPR, I developed a series of foldable dolls made from body parts printed, cut out, stitched, faded, broken apart and reconstructed. And along the journey, they became Fragile Fragments. In 2010, several surviving pieces were rescued, assembled as new bodies and re-baptized as Quitapenas, sorrow dolls that open up to a new decade of wandering and mending. Twenty years later, Apatridas or Stateless, a novel physical form of transplantation was needed. In 2020, based on the matrices so lovingly cut by Walter Guy, CFPR Research Laboratory Manager, I began to explore porcelain as vulnerable matter. Wet or dry, roughed or sculpted, clay means living particles exposed to tactile translations and the unsettledness in between. What initiated as a technical collaborative investigation within The Engaged Surface research group, opened up a nourishing dialogue towards the
–
possibilities of an extended biography for this ailing doll. Now in the hands of Niamh Fahy, Sonny Lightfoot and Tom McDonagh, these plural perspectives open up the consideration of topics of co-existence, impermanence, incompleteness and forms of iteration that can only be sustained through common efforts geared towards mending and restoration. When enforced isolation makes us fearful and everyone appears a subject of mistrust, we would like to imagine this project as a point of departure towards a new possible imprint of life where art remains a constant companion. Companionship in wanderings, companionship in confinement, Transplant means an ongoing reflection departing from the remains of a doll, a sentient fragment where the unsettling notion of the impossibility of a return meets the trust in a new departure: one heart beating in the hand of other. John Berger, (2001) The Shape of a Pocket, London: Bloomsbury
Overleaf Cecilia Mandrile
Fragile Fragments, 2000 | Print on cards, tape, thread | 40 x 70 cm
Overleaf Cecilia Mandrile Apatrida (Quitapenas), 2019 | Porcelain | 19 x 9 x 1 cm
Overleaf Cecilia Mandrile
Apatrida (Pieta), 2020 | Mixed clays, graphite | 20 x 19 x 5 cm
Quarantine Light Tom McDonagh
Our project began in the weeks running up to quarantine, when reports from China were still just tiny signals in the noise. The noise of images, virtual reality headsets, CNC machines, all came to a sudden, grinding halt. Among the many changes was the unexpected joy of wildlife reclaiming our empty city streets. The microscope has revealed our skin to be a rich metropolis; a vast surface of billions of competing and cooperating microbes. Just under our skin however our bodies are a monoculture of near-identical cells. To maintain this quarantine and keep the outside outside, we reject anything which is not ourselves. Our bodies hold a list of what is foreign, a so-called immunological memory.
Cecilia was imagining a hand mirror. The surface would not be an ever-changing reflection, but instead a fixed, fragile portrait. Our image had come down through many cycles of movement and stillness, of light and memory. When I received the latest generation, white porcelain framed faces, I found myself casting light on them yet again. It was clear they wished to be lit from the same upper right direction of the original photograph. I felt too they wanted to float somewhere, perhaps to float just beyond our atmosphere and orbit earth for a little while. When an agent emerges that is not known to our immunological memory, our only resort is to enlarge the quarantine beyond our bodies. We wash our skin, shut down our cities and isolate our countries. The tyranny of the body becomes global, and inside the quarantine we struggle to understand what this moment is.
We turn to the virtual to attempt connection without touch, movement without travel and imagine how the world will feel when we emerge again. Our collaboration became, like everything else, a virtual Lorem ipsum experience. On the screen Cecilia, Niamh and Sonny look towards me (or more accurately towards the camera), but never at each other. Our instinct to be an ‘empathetic mirror’ is all jumbled up because no one is sure who is mirroring whom. It is wonderful and tiring. Recently I delivered an online introduction to a local environmental group. Whilst reading our declaration, a participant’s voice started to crack. I had no way to tell if it was from emotion or a bad connection. There is pressure to have a ‘good lockdown’, but I’m content just to get through the mild misery of it all.
Our present burden appears to be how to prevent the quarantine becoming a state of mind; to persist a memory that we are like the diverse microbes with touch and contamination, movement and variety. Better still, the memory could move from one mind to another; a wild roaming memory that reclaims this space between us and extends our need to move and touch again.
May, 2020
Overleaf Tom McDonagh & Cecilia Mandrile Quarantine Light (Waxing), 2020 | Porcelain | 8 x 6 cm
Overleaf Tom McDonagh & Cecilia Mandrile Quarantine Light (Waning), 2020 | Porcelain | 8 x 6 cm
Overleaf Tom McDonagh & Cecilia Mandrile Quarantine Light (Full), 2020 | Porcelain | 8 x 6 cm
Glass Transplant Sonny Lightfoot
When asked to work on this project
I believed I was helping to produce a memorial to a lost tribe. At what point in that cycle I was interacting with them was unclear. They were displaced people, a lost tribe, transplanted from perhaps South America to travel around the world with Cecilia as their guardian. When crossing borders, this group were confronted with hostility and discrimination. In order to make their passage easier, their guardian created passports. I hoped we could raise the status of the tribe from refugees to saints. My understanding about their origin, was they had been generated through photographic methods, they had been reincarnated numerous times and taken various material forms, including cotton and canvas. For us, one of the ways to raise their status, was to change their material form, from their
common original bodies of old fabric to a more desirable glass. What I didn’t realise when starting the project was that we were not creating a memorial or monument, but rather creating new bodies, by transplanting the old bodies into new more permanent bodies of glass. The second realisation was that although their new transplanted glass bodies would be more permanent and more resistant to ageing, these new bodies were just as fragile but in a different way. If dropped they could shatter, they were less mobile, less robust, less able to travel for fear of breaking. Although they had risen in status through materiality, they were just as vulnerable and fragile as before. More importantly, they were reborn, alive again, and with us in the present. To transplant a tribe member to a glass body was a complicated operation with many steps and with significant risks. We had to create
moulds from moulds, grafting from one material into another, switch from negative impressions to positive impressions and back to negative. Finally, the glass bodies could be born from a mould that could endure the labour. The kiln felt like both a womb and a tomb – sealing the forms in a baptism of fire. The kiln reached temperatures in which most organic materials would combust. However, glass is transformed under these conditions, allowing it to become active, energized and alive. Once it reaches temperature, the glass flows to fill the negative void, creating a positive, a new life, and forming into a new body. Then for a number of hours it must rest at a lower temperature. The new body can relax and adjust, relieve any tensions with in itself, otherwise the glass could crack and the transplantation could be rejected. It is only when we open the kiln that we can know if the operation was a
Sonny images Glass tile
success. Finally, once out of the kiln we must chip away at the crumbling ruins of the mould to reveal and free the new and refreshed transplanted body of glass. From ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The new tribe were given to Niamh and transplanted back to light and shade, again putting them through a process that switches between positive and negative, back to positive, and back to their very origin as a photograph. And so, the cycle begins again. I hope from these new images they can be transplanted back into another physical body.
Overleaf Sonny Lightfoot & Cecilia Mandrile Glass Transplant (The Mould), 2020 | Refractory Plaster
Overleaf Sonny Lightfoot & Cecilia Mandrile
Glass Transplant (The Birth), 2020 | Translucent Glass, Refractory Plaster
Overleaf Sonny Lightfoot & Cecilia Mandrile Glass Transplant (The Preserved), 2020 | Transparent Glass
Fragments of Transplantation Niamh Fahy
Through the notion of transplantation,
each artist has been cast in the reciprocal role of caregivers, lifesavers and patients. As the project developed, I began to see Sonny as the surgeon, casting new life into the heart of these beings. Myself as a paramedic, accompanying the difficult transition from one place to the next, Tom as a physiatrist, enabling movement and energy, and Cecilia the lifeforce guiding us as both patient and parent. There is an ethics of care that exists between us, a collective understanding of the gentle treatment of this shared fragment. Holding these creatures, the impression of the surgeon’s hands can be felt in the grooves and subtle textures within their form, indexical marks that signal a new identity forming. On my initial encounter with these cast forms I was reminded of imagery I had seen from archaeological digs,
precious remnants of past lives laid out to piece together an incomplete history. Considering the tones of their form, earthy reds, muted greys and white, I wondered if life is just emerging or fading away? Both old and young, they co-exist as both children and ancestors, relics reborn. In them are the buried narratives of many people displaced, fragments of lives to be remembered and to remind. With each process these creatures undergo a transplantation. Working with wet plate photography they are in a continuous state of becoming, moving between liquid intelligence (Pasek, 2017) and solid form. I prepare the camera while Cecilia carefully unwraps her fragile kin. Together, we discuss the narrative of each family portrait; limb, torso and face are purposefully positioned. In these moments I get to know the family better, listening to Cecilia, my sensitivity towards each being grows stronger.
Working with-wet plate collodion is complex, the practitioner must follow a precise and deliberate procedure, each step must be exact, nonetheless unexpected issues often arise. I expose the plate and Cecilia watches the timer anxiously. Before the appearance of new life is exposed on the photographic plate, there is an interstice between being and becoming where anything can happen, and sometimes does. The plate is returned to the dark slide holder and we make a swift exit to the darkroom, the plate is then carefully washed before it is placed in the fix solution. If the transplant is successful, the image appears in seconds. However, sometimes the recipient substrate rejects the donated organ or takes on a new form, but only for a short while time enough for us to feel joy at this new life and also feel the ache of it fading away. There is a sense of loss as we witness light turn to shadow. In a way this is why we are here - to record
the shadows of those who are not visible, to acknowledge and bear witness to life displaced. On seeing the developed images, I am often taken aback by the translation of each portrait. Their forms change, new artefacts emerge, details of faces or hands are emphasised, while other information appears altered or lost through this process of transplantation. These plates are not just images of their cast ceramic forms, but rather they come to inhabit new identities, their essence intact, their anatomy transformed. These creatures remain whole in their fragmentation. Their existence is dependent on their capacity to survive in many forms and in many places. Separated or connected from their roots, this is a story that can be understood in any language.
Pasek, A. (2017) The Pencil of Error: Glitch Aesthetics and Post-Liquid Intelligence. Photography and Culture [online]. 10 (1), pp. 37–52. DOI:10.1080/17514517.2017.1295711 [Accessed 6 May 2020]
Overleaf Niamh Fahy & Cecilia Mandrile Being & Becoming, 2020 | Ambrotype | 10 x 12 cm
Overleaf Niamh Fahy & Cecilia Mandrile Trace of Care, 2020 | Ambrotype | 10 x 12 cm
Overleaf Niamh Fahy & Cecilia Mandrile Growing Pains, 2020 | Ambrotype | 10 x 12 cm
Carinna Parraman is Professor of Design Colour and Print, and Director of the Centre for Fine Print Research. Her research interest addresses, the relationship between the appearance of colour and materials, and how these are captured and reproduced in paintings and photographs. As a practitioner, she is a specialist in colour printing, Red-Green-Blue pigment printing, texture printing, photomechanical print history, colour theory and perception within the fields of fine art, design and the applied arts, in particular the craft of the digital. Cecilia Mandrile is a visual artist whose print-based wandering practice explores aesthetics of displacement. She has exhibited in international venues such as The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; El Museo del Barrio, New York; WPA Corcoran, Washington DC; the National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Caraffa Museum and Genaro Perez Museum, Córdoba, Argentina. Mandrile has been a resident artist at Gasworks Studios, London; Makan, Amman, Jordan; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley; Kunstihoone, Tallinn, Estonia; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium and Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE. Tom McDonagh is an artist concerned with origins of life, extinction, and climate justice. He is exploring different ways to understand our society’s sense of possibility and responsibility in the context of planetary history. With a training in physical sciences and puppetry, he incorporates technology, light, movement and found objects into a divergent range of performative artworks. He has performed and exhibited at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Barbican Centre, Kew Gardens, Bristol Old Vic, and Royal West of England Academy, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from The Rockefeller University and Sky Arts, and teaches at universities, colleges and schools.
Sonny Lightfoot is an artist with a love for material and process often subverting these two elements and weaving a wider narrative from them. He uses both traditional techniques and contemporary digital process and where possible combines the two to create his work. He has a passion for skill sharing and has worked in higher education as a technician, lecturer and researcher. Sonny is one half of the collaborative practice, Copper Sounds, whose focus is to explore sound through sonic sculptures, installations and live performances. Their work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, Arnolfini, Bristol and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. Niamh Fahy is an Irish artist, currently based in Bristol, UK. She works as a Research Associate at the Centre For Fine Print Research, University of the West of England and is currently studying for a PhD. She completed her BA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Ireland and holds an MA in multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of West England. Her research focuses on the historical relevance of 19th century wet-plate collodion photographic techniques and photomechanical reprographic methods in the contemporary depiction of landscape. She has exhibited her artworks at the Arnolfini, Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, Piano Noble Gallery, London and Bankside Gallery, London.
The Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) is a multi-disciplinary research team with a range of expertise: from scientists and technologists to designers and artists. We are exploring the future of printing and fabrication, alongside traditional methods of making. For more information please visit https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk
5