I was thinking of sensory experience of place. Not the pictorial narrative of the represented landscape; the signs we ascribe to reading the senses, but the elements of the space that pertain to actual experience. Thus the dilemma; how to transform sensory experiences that happen in a moment with intensity and richness into visual forms? How to confront pictorial convention while proposing other forms of imaging and imagining? The wave action on the sand is a tactile experience essential to the life of the sea. Feeling this tactile experience as one walks down the beach is a fundamental element of this environment, one that speaks of movement, change, time and cycles. The idea of sand contours is also like the human body, the flesh over the muscles, the curves of the skin, the bone beneath. It is this sensation that matters more than any notion of a photograph of a place.

There is an affective state in the process of onsite casting that has an entirely different quality and dimension to studio casting. I refer to an onsite casting of ripples in the sand. The tactile quality of the casting is tantalizingly graspable; what does it mean to grasp something—to understand it’s meaning, to physically perform an action? The graspable quality to which I refer is both and more. It is also the grasp of a total embrace, the cupping of two hands into a perfect form, the movement of the material through the body. This is it: materiality is physically indexed to the body, the material becomes the body, and the body can no longer separate itself from this material; a particular material and its treatment, a singular affective impulse; punctum.

The affective detail is an edge; the corner where the plaster has come up against the formwork after flowing out of the plastic wrap. There is a small gap between the plaster that was wrapped in plastic, and the plaster that has escaped, leaked into the sand. This small section of plaster has some sand attached to it. It is the relation between the two small areas of the casting that pierces me; between the cast sand ripple and the leaked plaster, between the controlled and the mishap. This moment of discord on the corner of this casting is that moment when the experience comes back in force, where the body embraces, grasps its materiality.

What wounds me are the forms of the relation, its images; or rather, what others call form I experience as force. The image—as the example for the obsessive—is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact the world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).[1]

Intractable, plaster, steel, 2009

[See casting]

[See tissue]