The Alchemy of the Scupltress
By Pierre Fouche

“I am overrated” said the sculptress to the sea,
“I’ve been praised for all the ways the marble leaves the man
And I was wrong to try and free him”
But for me, I am a vector
I am muscle, I am bone
[…] This all I know

So far have we gone from our roots in living nature that the living, not the dead, perplexes us. The pannaturalism of ancient and ancestral culture has given way to panmechanism, the norm of the lifeless.

Owen Pallett’s lyrics for the song Lewis takes off his shirt (2010) captures the anguish of the often debilitating artist’s ethic regarding the life of the artwork and its impact after the artist sets it free. Like Pallett’s character, Daniella Mooney is a sculptress who creates through the “vectors” of “muscle” and “bone”. Her works clearly attest to the labour of the reductive and constructive sculptural techniques she employs. But unlike the character in the song, Mooney doesn’t sculpt figures: hers is an aesthetic devoid of human representation.

Instead of the human figure, Mooney carves and constructs objects and installations that veer between abstraction and representation. When we do recognize familiar objects, they remind of man-made objects and singularities of history touching bases with contemporaneity, modernism’s seduction of pure form, Victorian patterning (the surface treatment of The Mirror of Ink), the monolithic structures of prehistory, science.. in a word then: the relics of culture.

While there are no “men” in her work, humanity remains strongly implicated. Mooney sculpts the signs of culture - albeit with a twist of magic - with the archetypal building blocks of civilization: wood & stone. These are media that aptly connote Culture (through their age-old use as building materials) as well as its inseparable twin Nature :

Wood and stone connote human industry through its use in construction - the taming of Nature. Wood and stone can also allude to science through the association of these materials with biology & geology – the scrutiny of Nature in order to know Her secrets. Few can deny the grandeur of trees and rock formations that have consistently been associated with the sublime. Wood and stone thus contain a symbolic element of metaphysics and spirituality - Her secrets remain hidden.

The spiritual/fantastical element in Mooney’s work is equally human too: mysticism and the imagination define humanity as much as the industry of opposable thumbs. In her work, we find that sunlight is filtered into a perpetual golden dawn and the semi industrial gallery view becomes a forest (Other Days, Other Eyes). Like a miracle by a mischievous messiah, water is turned into ink (The Mirror of Ink). Islands float, devoid of inhabitants, yet showing the signs of their suburban existence (Obscured by Clouds). Moss covered stones balance in defiance of gravity (The New Maclear’s Beacon). A wooden lamp shines a broad beam of crystals (Crepuscular Ray).

The ubiquity of the occurrence of floating islands in fiction, science- and otherwise, from as far back as Aeolia in Homer’s The Odyssey, to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi substantiates the figure’s potential reading as symbolic archetype. The geography of Mooney’s sculptural ‘scale model’ versions in stone and wood (Obscured by Clouds) with meticulously crafted wooden lampposts and model trees tap into the familiarity and the otherworldliness of both nature and the human imagination: In conversation with the artist in her studio she mentioned that astronomers discovered a planet composed entirely of compressed carbon - a diamond - which resonates with a “gong”-sound (which is how they discovered its composition). She also mentioned that they named the planet “Lucy”. The wonders of nature inspire us to know more, yet our discoveries often prove that our dreams have been true all along.

It is subsequently no wonder then that Mooney’s interest in science, nature, and the human condition has led her to that perilous proximity of science and witchcraft: the protoscience of alchemy. While symbolism from alchemy informs much of her work, The Mirror of Ink (2011) exemplifies. The work is a fully operational fountain carved and constructed out of meranti in a style and surface treatment reminding of victorian floral patterning. Instead of water, the structure ejects a fountain of black ink that collects in a main circular pool. The three concentric circles of the mandala/celestial orbit-like basic design expand into the vertical depth to become vessels of progressively smaller proportions. The ink collects, and overflows in and out of the vessels only to spire back to the fountain summit. The liquid-level stays in equilibrium, paradoxically through flux. This marriage of opposites finds an echo in the fluid blackness of the large round pool, which references the alchemical concept of what Jung in his later works calls Sol Niger: the black sun[1] (cited in Marlan 2005:4) – a symbolic construct for the potent potential of darkness to facilitate renewal. The fountain is furthermore a potent symbol for the self (Jung 1968:118). The incorporation of the black sun figure in a fountain of wood emulating foliage thus foregrounds the internal transformative power of the self as hauntingly natural.

In a final comparison between Daniella Mooney and the sculptress of Pallet’s song (whose ethical dilemma of freeing “men” out of “marble” leaves her staring at the sea) it is clear that Mooney needn’t deliberate about the ethics of the objects she leaves behind: even a brief encounter with the magic of her work shows an ethic that is firmly grounded in counteracting “panmechanism, the norm of the lifeless” (King 1989:116).

W. and I went to De Waal Park one Sunday for a picnic. I walked up to the fountain which served as the model for “The Mirror of Ink” to see how close Mooney’s version is. It is faultless…

Notes:

[1] The psychological concept that correlates with the black sun is egocide (Rosen 2002), the equally perplexing equation of birth and death

List of referenced works:

- Jaggar, A.M. (ed.). (1989). Gender/body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing. Rutgers University Press.
- Jung, C.G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- King, Y. (1989). ‘Healing the wounds - Feminism, Ecology and Nature/Culture dualism’ in A.M Jaggar (ed.) Gender/body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing. Rutgers University Press. p.116.
- Marlan, S. (2005). The black sun: the alchemy and art of darkness. Texas A&M University Press
- Pallett, O. (2010). Lewis takes off his shirt. (lyrics from the 12”single). Domino Records.
- Rosen, D. (2002) Transforming depression: healing the soul through creativity. Nicolas-Hays.