Decay you say? (part 1)
Although I thought I understood my connection and interest in the concept of decay, throughout the process I have continued to return to a place of insecurity and doubts around my concept. Why do I care about decay again? Why I am doing this? Where is it leading me!?!? Round and round I go, until Andrew usually offers some sort of reasonable and level headed reminder of why I shouldn't toss the baby out with the bath water, and sanity prevails for the next day or two. Ultimately though, I realized (realized = advised by my lovely teacher Kate) I did have a lot of questions that needed to be answered, either through inward reflection or more academic research. So, I went about doing just that and low and behold Kate was right. Though I have yet to answer ALL my questions, and more have popped up through my research, I have a lot more clarity on this theme and my connection to it.
Some of the questions I was wrestling with:
Why decay?
What do I want to know about decay?
What do I want to communicate about decay?
Is this work personal?
Is this just about decay as visual inspiration?
Do I have passion for this topic? A connection to it?
What is my end goal?
I decided to zero in on what I wanted to know about decay as a good place to start. Quickly into my academic research, however, I realized there were many different ways I could go about studying decay. Do I study it from a scientific perspective? Do I look into other art about decay? Do I experiment myself with decay?!? (Side story: That reminds me of when my brother, who was a teenager at the time, conducted a school experiment with rotting lunch meat in his bedroom. Teenage boys smell so bad.) Do I watch a video about decay and capture how it made me feel? I decided to pause and consider my approach to the research and what I was actually interested in learning/exploring. This pause gave me the idea to think about my approach to decay in three different ways: decay as visual inspiration, decay as symbolism, and decay as a philosophy. Once I had these three filters, it was much easier to find meaningful resources that I connected with and that were relevant to my capstone. Let's jump into what I found!
Decay as visual inspiration
If you have ever come in contact with rotting fruit, it shouldn't be hard to understand why and how decay would be used as visual inspiration. Just think of all the varying and evolving colours, textures, and forms! To research the visual components of decay, I first went to the science.
The process of decay changes depending on what we are talking about, but regardless it is always rich in visual inspiration. For fruit, it starts with the growth of fungus and bacteria on the outer skin. This is what leads to mould and all the stunning colour changes a rotting piece of fruit goes through. Then the internal volume loses mass due to transpiration. And since fruit is largely made up of water, it is in this stage where the form of the fruit drastically changes and starts to decline. It continues this way until it is nothing. (source)
With regards to human decay, there are four very distinct stages and the process is a bit more intense. In the first stage, autolysis, the build up of carbon dioxide creates an acidic environment that starts to eat at the body from the inside. The next stage, enzymes start producing gases that cause the body to bloat, sometimes to double its size! Active decay is is when everything starts to liquify, leading you to the last and final stage of skeletonization (which I feel is pretty self explanatory). (source)
In these last two paragraphs alone I take away visual cues like acidic, mould, bloat, volume loss, liquify, rigidity...so many to go off of.
After the inspiration from science, it was also really helpful to research what other artists (who have explored decay) found visually inspiring. Dieter Roth (a Swiss multidisciplinary artist), for example,"was extremely interested in the structure of decay - its form, play of colours, the variations of putrefaction and mould, and their ornamental aspects, the natural mutuation of things..."as noted by Heide Skowranek in the Tate article Should We Reproduce the Beauty of Decay? .
Another interesting quote around the visual aspects of decay I found, said by the French-German, expressionist poet Iwan Goll: “decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.”
Lastly, below is a visual example of art that I believe falls in line with decay as a visual inspiration. Tiffanie Turner's work What Befell Us was an exploration into our collective negative views and discomfort around the appearance of aging. Her beautiful paper flower sculptures depicted flowers a little past their prime, challenging the viewer to ask themselves whether beauty only lives in the physical perfection of youth.
What Befell Us
2019
As you can see there is so much to dissect about decay, I'm going to have to continue in another post. In the meantime, I hope this post gives us all something to stew on and contemplate. TO BE CONTINUED...
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