DAY SIXTEEN

How does emotion convey itself in creativity or making, either in the practice or the appreciation of it?

 

There are some obvious answers to this - colour, materials, the energy or vibrancy of design or movement; tone, melody, volume, speed, consonance and dissonance; proportion, harmony, perspective, and so on. In some hands these can be deliberately used and manipulated to convey a certain feeling (that's pretty much the point of music, if only to entertain), other times the emotion grows from the finished artefact with no thought or design necessarily being given to it. 

 

Sometimes, with fine art, for example, or architecture, I feel there is something a little 'forced' or taught about these things; one has a sense of what one ought to feel because of the tradition from which a work has emerged or its longstanding inclusion in the canon. I often fail to get whatever it is I'm supposed to in such curcumstances and am left puzzled and curious rather than moved.

 

Ideally the evocation of emotion is a mystery and its experience ineffable.

 

I had such an experience with the work pictured here. Its title is the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, made by Grayson Perry [Wikipedia, opens in new window], and from an exhibition of the same name which he curated. I saw it at the British Museum more than ten years ago and part of the experience is still vivid and more than a little uncharacteristic of me. The museum's website describes the exhibition thus: 

Grayson Perry's playful memorial to the unnamed craftsmen and women who made some of the wonders of history.

Created and displayed as part of an exhibition at the British Museum in 2011 and 2020, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman is a sculpture of an iron ship, sailing into the afterlife. The ship is hung with hand-made replicas of British Museum objects, representing crafts made through history – by forgotten men and women – which have survived into the present day.

 

That description makes it sound a bit plain but the exhibition was very far from that. It included pieces from across several millenia, and many world cultures including I was particularly pleased and interested to see, works from many indigenous peoples.

The ship was towards the very end of the exhibition and was located on a plinth in the centre of a small dim and softly lit chamber. 

With no particular expectation I approached what looked to be a collection of rusted flotsam and from out of nowhere my mood changed: I started to feel very emotional, tearful in fact. Scared by the strength of my reaction I retreated, recoiled might be the better description, towards one of the side walls - and the emotion went away. Leaning against the wall I studied the sculpture coolly, trying to concentrate on the individual bits and pieces it was made from and wondering whether I might have just had a panic attack.

A half-minute later, my breathing having settled down and feeling more confident, I approached the ship again, and the self-same thing happened. I started to tear up, and had to retreat to the side wall a second time. 

It was then that the two friends I was with entered the chamber and came over to me. They asked if I was Ok, and I replied fine, encouraging them to go up close to the sculpture; I wanted to see their reaction. There was none that I could see from my point glued to the wall so I cautiously approached the ship for the third time, coming up behind (and, so I was thinking, shielded by) my friends to listen to their conversation - and it happened again.

It was like there was some sort of force field around that piece that grew stronger the closer I stood, but by this time I'd had enough of whatever voodoo was going on in that chamber and made for the exit, finding sanctuary in the brightness of the overly illuminated shop where my friends found me still discombobulated a few minutes later. 

The experience remains a mystery.  

 

The closest I've come to explaining it to myself is that some connection was struck in my mind or heart that cold winter's evening between the rusted, scrappy, tired, used, worn appearance of the piece, the connotations of the words 'unknown craftsman' and all the testaments to their work I'd just seen, and my even then long-deceased father who had spent a lifetime unnoticed, cleaning, repairing and restoring stonework on churches and other public buildings, extending their lives and bringing back to life (and notice) the glory and simple beauty created by the builders and craftsmen who had preceded him down the centuries. It's a thought.

Onwards...