Artwork title : Rosa Columbarium

ECOCRITICAL POETICS OF THE REAL

Epitaph: ‘I look at the cut flower in the vase and see my gaze returned, but the flower is not looking at me from the same place as where I see it.’

Executed through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics, the sculpture articulates symbolic lack in the flower-vase convention – the consuming custom of cutting flowers from nature and placing these in a vase for interim prestige. Without symbolic fulfilment, the custom is none other than a lure for an unattainable object of desire.

The object cause of desire is the unsymbolisable real or primordial nature from where the flower was cut and to where the partial object, ineffably, returns. It is our anthropocentric custom to conceal the wound of the amputated organ behind the rim of the vase; and before the living-dead Thing shrivels down the neck of the vase to rot in the sepulchral void, we, apathetically, conceal the cadaver residue in the rubbish bin – without mourn for loss of pollination and rejuvenating longevity of nature.

The rim of the flower vase is the extimité placeholder for loss – this is where the distorted representation of nature and the unsustainable image of man as master of nature meet. This is the appropriate place for ethical intervention and aesthetic sublimation. Here, the artists positioned a nameless artifice, a fascinating anamorphic mass that sublimates the Thing which conventional trajectory is unable to symbolise. The aesthetic improvisation provides the viewer with an anamorphic trajectory from where the real is encapsulated, symbolic prestige reconfigured, and consequential aesthetic reception reimagined.

Like the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello, who asks the reader why it is so difficult to think ourselves empathically into the lives of other living creatures, the uncanny trajectory enables the viewer to contemplate the gaze of cut flowers in the sepulchral vase.

MEDIUM:

Size: 410mm x 150mm - (2kg)                       

Hand-coiled ceramic: glaze, gold luster, and vitreous enamel.

Multiple firing: 1075 – 740 degrees Celsius.

Production date: 2021/12/10