III.
Failing to Fetch Me at First (2010), steel, paint, foam, wood, approx 75 x 196 x 70.5 cm.
ART iT: You often draw work and exhibition titles from literature and poetry, like the card you made for Castillo Coralles in Paris, with the excerpt from TS Eliot’s poem “East Coker” printed on it. When you quote these sources, are you thinking about the imagery of the poetry as it relates to the work?
TD: No, never. The text exists by itself. I use the poetry as a tool. It is a material as much as plaster: a physical tool that is part of the sculpture, not an explanation or translation. At the time of the Paris exhibition the Eliot poem was very much my situation, my physical and interior situation. It came to me. When I was asked to make an invitation card I started working on an image for the card, but then as I continued reading, I thought I need to use the whole long passage, so I added the text as well.
ART iT: It’s a beautiful passage:
“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes and ashes to earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces.
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.”
But it’s not a quotation for you?
TD: No. It is not a quotation. It’s just a sculpture. For me it is sculpture in itself. Sculpture is very close to poetry. You take words and fit them together. It’s not just about the content – how you put everything together is very important. The poet Joseph Brodsky also said that making poetry is very close to making sculpture. He said that when he was thinking he would guess what would come next, which is a similar process to sculpture maybe. The result has a meaning and significance, but it has to be built up, and it all has to work together through physical forces.
Thea Djordjadze: The Secret Border in Human Closeness