Māteriae

Māteriae*

workshop – immersion

permanence / decomposition

coffin / functional object

death / transformation

wood / saprobiontic organisms

father / daughter

What happens in a carpenter’s workshop after hours? What may the life of matter look like, the matter from which craftsman’s objects are made? What is happening to such objects over time?

I am an observer of everyday workshop activities, which provoke many questions and deliberations of philosophical and existential nature. I’m a sculptress. My father is a carpenter making coffins. In my life, for years coffins have functioned in an abstract sphere as sets of fragments: numbers, slang names, geometrical elements, types of wood. Treated as functional objects, they were a natural element of life based in our (East European) culture. I decided to share this unusual perspective and within the framework of a workshop laboratory in 2017 I started apprenticeship at my dad’s workshop. As a result of this learning and my master’s struggles with illness, I made a series of works Jestem Spokojna (I take it easy), dealing with transitoriness. I decided to take a step further. Wondering about: What is this ‘life after life’ of matter? What’s its dimension? Can you measure it with a tool? Can you design, program it in the way a cell programs its death? This avalanche of questions seems to never end, and I am timidly trying to give a form to some answers.

The material used for making a functional object – coffin, in this tale becomes a metaphor of death as a transformation. I am trying to see the processes and protagonists invisible with a naked eye.

Protagonists:

Carpenter

Wood (oak, beech, lime, ash, spruce)

Saprobiontic fungi (Daedalea Guercina, Steccherinum ochraceum, Phlebiopsis gigantea, Xylaria hypoxylon, Xylaria polymorpha)

Workshop, and inside it:

drawings, objects, measures, samples, notes, prototypes

[text Agnieszka Wach]

* Latin

māteria, plural māteriae

1. matter; material; substance

2. timber

IPA: /maˈtɛ.rjɛ:/