‘Let us not mince words, the
marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only
the marvellous is beautiful.’
André
Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.
Chris De Rosa swims almost daily in
the ocean where she dives into another world; one full of organisms “rich and
strange”
She collects seaweed and sponges from the shoreline along the coast where she
lives. These organisms have gone through a “sea-change”
and long lost the richness of their original state. These displaced forms have
come to resemble terrestrial vegetation.
Who of us hasn’t stared long at
forms from the natural world and seen pictures within them: horses in the
clouds, faces in the trees. Perhaps finding recognisable images in an otherwise
threatening exterior world provides us with comfort or indeed a needed escape
into a world of the imagination.
For the Surrealist artists and
writers the natural landscape and its forms provided a slew of metaphors of a
space beyond the self. Automatic drawing techniques such as frottage (the taking of rubbings from various natural
surfaces) and decalcomanie lent
themselves to the creation of ‘landscapes of the mind’ featuring weird
vegetable and mineral formations. The artists were intrigued by unlikely
parallels between the world of material reality and the world of the human
imagination. Natural and found objects were valued only in so far as
they embodied a mysterious coming together of objective reality, chance and
unconscious desires.
The Wunderkammer (wonder-room) of
Renaissance Europe was a repository for the kind of objects that the Surrealist
artists were taken with. The wonder-cabinet brought together objects from the
mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms displayed alongside those displaying
human craft intervention on organic and inorganic materials (including fakes).
This juxtaposition blurred the boundaries between what was deemed ‘natural’ and
that which was man -made. The control of nature was the goal of early
collecting practices, and was the impetus behind the ordering and cataloguing
of objects and artefacts.
De Rosa’s studio is its own
Wunderkammer of sorts, walls strewn with collections of sponges, seaweeds and
other littoral detritus. There is a schema to these displays but one not rooted
in scientific order or nomenclature. All of the objects assembled share a
quality of ‘otherness’ or what the Surrealist poet Andre Breton referred to as
marvellousness.
Although much of the impetus for
these works is environmentally driven the underlying project is to do with
wonder rather than ecology. There is a myth
in which a young Venetian seafarer brought his beloved a rare piece of salt
encrusted seaweed from a Venetian lagoon. It seemed as though fashioned by
sirens. To preserve its beauty, she took a needle and thread and painstakingly
copied it, tracing out the seaweed's design, and thus lace was invented. De
Rosa’s works are plucked and torn in a kind of reversal of lace making.These
pieces are the outcome of a sea change in another reversal where the artist has
resurrected those littoral organisms and has ‘made them anew’ to re-instil them
to a state of thalassic wonder.
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