Metaphor…
I’ve definitely become more & more interested in how metaphors act upon understanding, how they influence communication, and how they can both improve and disintegrate a person’s ability to think.
I was chatting with Siobhán earlier about the question of ‘why’ we are transplanting work from one place to another, from Killaun Bog, to our respective studios & this blog, and eventually to the gallery in Stoneybatter. Why are we doing this? Isn’t that the way of things, the way of language, the way of communication? The anxiety to explain why… anxiety to explain why…
…It’s personal – it’s a metaphor… perhaps. It’s unfolding.
I was reading an article today on Ecology, Complexity and Metaphor and I found it very helpful & reassuring, regarding the above, and the implication of declaring ones art as metaphor. The writers are James D. Proctor and Brendon M. H. Larson:
” The Greek root of metaphor means ‘to transfer or to carry’, and
Metaphor implies a mapping between two domains”
They go on to write:
“We may…conceive of metaphors as nomadic terms that link
disparate discourses, both public & scientific”
This idea of a transference or carrying over makes a lot of sense to me – a relation between two things, or between several things… but it seems that there must always be more than one for the carrying over to happen, and then there’s the action of tracing that relation, linguistically or visually or aurally… Allowing one place to carry meaning over to another – an effort to understand experience, to understand one’s place in things.
And sure this is an eternal effort, and entirely human perhaps…
…I don’t know whether animals use metaphors?
Seismometer RHA studio July 2010
I built a seismometer in my studio last summer, which was operated by simulations of sound waves of volcanic activity transmitted through speaker and a computer.
Alchemical Reserve 