Thursday 6 July 1989

Carl Whiteside: Le premier récit de la création (The First Book of Creation)


Carla Whiteside's The First Book of Creation consists of nine clay “drawings.” I use the word drawings cautiously because clearly, they are not drawings in the traditional sense of the word. Clay, as a medium of visual art, is generally associated with sculpture and indeed the artist's experiments with clay and its expressive properties began in the sculpture studio. The application of clay to the flat surface, however, has more in common with techniques of painting. The clay is applied in washes, in subtle degrees of tone and colour, at times smooth and at times with a ''painterly'' texture.

The works' character as “drawings” becomes manifest when the artist begins the process of removing the layers of clay much as an artist working in charcoal or graphite would use the gum eraser to define subtle gradations of tone to create volume from flat, darkened areas, or to define contours with the negative erased line. Gradually, the amorphous, solid area of clay – that dense, inert mass – takes on a more complex form. The erasures break it up into areas, and those areas may, through gradations of tone, define volume. Lines divide spaces and create areas of volume. They describe direction and energy which travel across the clay surface. The whole emerges as an active ground of perceptible surface texture, contour and tonally described volume. These are the qualities which Carla Whiteside balances and contrasts when drawing in clay. 

Along the bottom of each drawing runs a continuous text. At either end of the drawing this text lies at the threshold of perceptibility, distinguished from the clay surface only by the low relief of the letters. Toward the centre of the drawing the letters and the words of the text emerge from their obscurity to contrast with the white of the exposed paper. These words and phrases, familiar from the book of Genesis, serve as titles. 

The image and text have a special relationship. The text does not stand outside the drawing like an explanatory note or a key to understanding; rather it weaves its way through the image – it is part of the image – like the integral warp of a tapestry. The text's antiquity, its resonant solemnity, its imagistic rendering of the creation as the basis of all life illuminates and is illuminated by the drawing from which it emerges.

It would be misunderstanding the artist's aims, however, to see in these drawings an illustration of the book of Genesis. The associations which the text brings forth lend texture and timbre to the images. They retain, however, no specific meaning. The words and phrases are drawn out of the larger text – out of context – and in so doing are left open to a multiplicity of interpretation and significance. 

Genesis, as a creation myth, is the story of the creator in the image of an all-powerful man. Purposefully, he designs a universal order that he judges to be “good.” Within this order there is given a specific hierarchy of beings which have specific purposes and roles. Creation is a human concept. The universe, the earth and its infinite life forms could only have been conceived as the product of a creator by a being who also creates. How does the artist create now that tradi­tional hierarchies are discredited? How does the artist create without imposing roles and purposes or proposing meanings when they cannot be known? Is it possible for a creation myth to emerge which describes a unity of living things as liberating instead of a hierarchy of living things as predetermined? 



Carla Whiteside, UN FLOT MONTAIT DE TERRE ET ARROSAIT TOUT (THERE WENT UP A MIST FROM THE EARTH AND WATERED THE WHOLE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.

In this context the influence of feminism plays a significant role. Whiteside acknowledges the initial attraction of clay as a reference to the feminist rediscovery of pre-Christian earth goddesses – a female creator. Consequently, all textual references have undergone a gender change from the familiar masculine to the feminine. This is received neither polemically, nor as proselytizing, but rather as a natural expression of the creator (the artist) representing creation in terms of personal knowledge. 

The artist speaks of re-mythification and re-enchantment in connection with her work, where the knowledge of the self and the knowledge of greater things – outside "historical, cultural and personal times'' merge into an aesthetic pleasure that is timeless. As one meditates upon these nine drawings one is reminded of the dual image of their particular, handcrafted quality and of the large, impersonal associations of earth, creation and the time before light was divided from darkness. The contrast and inextricably bound character of the finite and the infinite, the personal and impersonal, of time and timelessness are the mythical forces and sublime narrative of this work.

1.        PORTANT SEMENCE (YIELDING SEED), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
2.        SOYEZ FÉCONDE (BE FRUITFUL), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
3.        QU'ELLES SERVENT DE SIGNES (LET THEM BE FOR SIGNS), clay, iron chromate, graphite on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
4.        QUI LA SÉPARAIT DES TÉNÈBRES (WAS DIVIDED FROM THE DARKNESS), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
5.        ELLE COUVAIT L’ABÎME ET SON ESPRIT PLANAIT SUR LES LIEUX (SHE WAS UPON THE FACE OF THE DEPTH AND HER SPIRIT MOVED UPON THE FACE OF THE WATERS), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
6.        ELLE ÉTAIT VAGUE ET VIDE (SHE WAS WITHOUT FORM AND VOID), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
7.        COMME PUISSANCE DE LA NUIT (AS RULER OF THE NIGHT), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
8.        UN FLOT MONTAIT DE TERRE ET ARROSAIT TOUT (THERE WENT UP A MIST FROM THE EARTH AND WATERED THE WHOLE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988.
9.        ET TU MOURRAS CERTAINEMENT (AND THOU SHALT SURELY DIE), clay, iron chromate, graphite, paint on paper, 43 x 90 inches, 1988-89.

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