'the lump of stuff which makes her up’, 2020.
Deconstructed towel with image of towel, 59.4 x 104.2 x 131 cm
'lump' is often found in discussions of material constitution and modal paradox. This tends to make reference to Allan Gibbard's 1975 article 'Contingent Identity' which introduced 'Lumpl and Goliath' as a means of considering how material exists and persists. Katherine Hawley's 2001 book 'How Things Persists' invigorates the discourse in introducing Tibbles, the cat, and the 'lump of feline stuff which makes her up' - the two are coincident, overlapping, but have different histories and persistence conditions.
'Co-located objects with different features'
These thoughts fuelled my (un)making.
Taking a towel - discoloured, threadbare in places with a rip towards the edge, no longer in use: lumpen. Nailing this towel to a wall, photographing it and then completely unthreading it with my bare hands.
The subsequent lump of thread (the substance) is positioned in dialogue with the image of the towel (the appearance).
The image of the towel is printed to scale; from afar, this gives the illusion of the towel still existing in this way. Upon closer inspection, the appearance is shattered. The image is split into 10 parts, a logistic due to being printed at home on A4 printer paper. Each part is nailed to the wall.
The lumpen mass of threads is a direct link to 'die lumpen', or 'the rags'.