Mel Dixon

Zhu Ohmu’s white, corrugated, bulging vessels appear to occupy a place in the world where there is a confluence and collapse between what a vessel is, its purpose, and what it can formally and conceptually expand out into the common human psyche. These vessels approach themselves in a state of collapse – lapsing over and moving in and out of a space where a personal and collective world consciousness is inhabited. This is a
personal appreciation of loss, but more specially it is of a sense of losing. The softness of knowing what is slipping away.

“To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it.” 

-Rebecca Solnit
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“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” 

– Pauline Oliveros

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Silence is often interpreted as a lack of sound. An imagined internalised summit of solitude within ourselves that isolates us from the world and humanity. Mute of character, anechoic and sinister – a space in which to find something lost or to amplify the abundance of our own voice. If John Cage’s 4’ 33”, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of performative tacet silence is the absolution of the awareness that silence, beyond modern intervention, does not exist, then Pauline Oliveros explores silence beyond passive listening and into a space of active, deep listening.

As an artist, I have long been fascinated with attempting to measure the space between myself and the world; alongside the material and conceptual aspects of my art practice. In the becoming that takes place in the creation of an object or an idea, a photograph or a drawing, there is a certain kind of adaption which occurs within the internal life of the imagined that has interested me. We all carry personal sensitivities around our imaginary relationships with our heroes. Some are private and secured, others we proclaim loudly with heartfelt passion. Throughout time we weave, layer meaning, and inherently lose control of the line between us and them. There are sensitive psychological boundaries one must traverse when encountering the fictional narratives we build for ourselves in service to our art praxis. In this particular instance, I examine the imagined space between myself and artist Edmund de Waal. A series of fictional letters attempts to capture the transitional space of creative life, treading a line between two separate kinds of space; a sacred private space which exists between us and our heroes; and a liminal, productive space between artists and their work. This is a fictitious exchange of ideas surrounding the relationship between de Waal, his material practice of porcelain ceramic production and the touch which inhabits the conceptual and material foundations of his work. The letters are affectionate, filled with personal inflection, and at the time of their writing, occupied a space in my own art praxis in which I was attempting to unravel the relationships between an artist, their materials and their research. On revisiting these letters now, almost two years after having written them, there are gaps. There are moments of entanglement where I can see how I felt at that particular time; how much it must have meant to me to put those words down on paper. And there are other places where I want to correct myself, say no, or offer a different opinion or verb. Like re-reading anything you have spent time away from, the words lift in different ways and are at times cumbersome and hard to say or agree with. For these reasons, they have been edited, not to correct so much as to clarify.

This research paper is presented by Mel Dixon to the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in the field of Visual Art at The Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne.

Supervisor: Dr Kate Daw
Date: October 2018