Ebb, Flow and Raven Gloss: Looking at Emma Fielden’s Approaching Zero
by Carol Jenkins

Poet Carol Jenkins’ essay about Fielden’s solo exhibition Approaching Zero at Dominik Mersch Gallery (2020).

The Zero Waits¹

            I sidle so close to the numbers
            that a molecule couldn't get between
            us but they were still too haughty, too rigid
            and superstitious to acknowledge me.

After my first maths class on calculus, I dreamt I was differentiated and then integrated, an insight which I credit to calculus itself, and Mr Connor, my laconic Maths teacher’s lucid explanation. Post-dream I found a satisfying frisson in solving these equations, it was better than easy, it had traction.  Mercifully I was not such total nerd that I confessed the dream or how much fun calculus was to my peers.  

Emma Fielden’s show at Dominik Mersch Gallery, inspired by calculus, matters celestial and Magritte, turns on moments of transformation, honing in on the tension between states of being, black and white, and in her drawings, notably The Veil, what happens as you sidle up to zero.  Mercifully, she has not kept her thoughts on calculus, space, zero and infinity to herself, but has made them manifest in her work. 

CONFLUENCE

Confluence is a set of diptychs; we might call them pour-spills, flow-mills, ink-wells or puddle-pours of Sumi ink. Each of the pair flows away and into the other, making conversations that come up to the brink, to an edge. They nudge, in a calculating way, at limits. Is the auto-sheen gloss of Sumi ink a hypnotic Rorschach test, is each pair with their uneven pattern perhaps a nod at the asymmetries of marriage? They suggest worm holes, having the absolute blackness of nothingness, but without the existential angst that black holes evoke.

For these Fielden uses bottled Sumi, Japanese calligraphy ink, which has a consistent viscosity and degree of blackness. Traditionally Sumi ink comes as a stick - a compound of burnt wood - carbon and water-soluble glue, which is ground on an ink stone with water, a slow and meditative practice to clear the mind and value the ink. In the diptychs the meditation comes post pour, in considering the relationship of the ink with the surface, the way it grips and contorts that paper, suggesting that we have shifted from the two dimensions of work on paper to something with a sculptural third dimension.

Sumi ink is usually diluted for calligraphy but Fielden pours and drips it straight onto the paper — a concentrate of a hundred million kanji — a constellation of characters like the beginning of the universe – that spreads into self-organising forms, an ebb and flow of raven gloss, as if a black bird was set out to be landscape or the night had been compressed and made to wait discretely.

Recently I knitted an odd pair of socks, my cavalier approach to the pattern and rush on the first sock to turn the toes (why I ask myself later? ) in the gloomy Netflix reading lamp in which I squinted with only partial success, graduated to a little oho - ah ha moment on the second sock. This second one has an exemplary rounded off toe, though a good inch more in the foot than the first sock. Asymmetrical or not they are still a couple, by shape and complexity, as the diptychs are. They go together but are discontinuous.

The Sumi ink, poured and dropped onto the paper, is pushed around by its own weight, interacting with the paper’s capacity to contain it. There is no imposed symmetry along the vertical axis, but the two forms make paired equivalencies of ink, or twin valences that operate across the liminal gap that divides them, hinting at liquidities of thought and the impossibility of anything actually, truly connecting. They suggest we are all islands but at times, when moved by the sublime we forget there is a space between us.

Exemplars of textural shifts, the diptychs are studies in the geometry of coalescence. They are objects to stare at and let the imagination off the leash, to wonder about their run of long loping curves and to trace and retrace with the eye the smaller coastline of their curves. The very few stray dots, miniscule outliers, are strangely satisfying; perhaps it is the contrast of their diminutive size, tiny islands against a continent of ink that suggests space and astronomical distances. While writing this I’ve been reading Wislawa Szymborska’s collected work, ‘View with a Grain of Sand’. Symborska, a Russian poet everyone should read, makes an excellent literary lens for Fielden’s work. Consider this stanza from Born.²

            The boat from which he stepped
            into the world,
            into un-eternity…

Szymborska’s approach, in Born and other poems, has a parallel in Fielden’s method, in deliberating, conjuring something that is not infinite but implies or alludes to infinity by being just on the other side of it. Szymborska pinches in on the space between eternity and un-eternity— as does Fielden in the tense gap between the two continuities of ink, between touching and not touching, she frames the idea of infinite closeness.  

THE VEIL (AFTER RENEÉ MAGRITTE'S THE LOVERS)
ALMOST NOTHING, ALMOST EVERYTHING

Magritte’s painting The Lovers, catalyst and inspiration for the drawings in Fielden’s show, depicts two heads at a Hollywood angle of embrace, tantalisingly close and both covered entirely in a short veil. There is a palpable tension; to be in love is to fall, to step towards the void. In this separation between the two heads love is blind.

The Veil pivots both on the allure of what is partly visible and the intrigue with what is concealed. The withheld and the taboo tantalise, what is underneath? Anticipation and longing are to my thinking the most romantic qualities and Magritte’s surreal landscape with its idealised and anonymised lovers uses to affect the swoony state of not-knowing as an aphrodisiac. With so little known so much can be imagined. In these drawings the fine lace of zeros that create a nearly unknowable number, Fielden has made veils that play with optics, nothingness and romance to hypnotic effect.

This morning my neighbourhood is veiled with fog, a fine white mist whose aggregate I see best when I get to the top of my long driveway from where I have a view down to Edwards Bay and across to Middle Head. It is tempting to stand in my hodge-podge of pj pants, old Henley, long cardigan and vintage slippers and not so much as survey but absorb the scene, listen to its cotton wool quiet. This is what The Veil does, it seduces the gaze. After collecting the paper and taking a coffee over to the shed³ , I continue studying the morning fog, there is the smell of wood smoke in the air, and a worrying graph of Covid19 resurgence in Melbourne but I settle into my morning notes, working at ink and paper, making marks.

I want to distinguish what fogs and veils do from what they are. Fielden’s Veil is a precise array of zeros that follow after a decimal point, until somewhere towards the end of the string of around 800,000 zeros is, a single ‘one’. I visited her studio in Rydalmere in July 2020 and when I looked at The Veil, really looked into it, to say I was hypnotised is inadequate as it suggests passivity. I am susceptible to concepts and objects that touch on the infinite, and so I was overtaken by rapture, it was like the actor or dancer on stage that one’s eyes keep going back to, the new lover that one can’t get enough of gazing at, I kept looking at it; up very close with a magnifying glass, off to one side to get the moiré effect of the lines. Studying the variable thickness of the zeros’ gradations of black and variances of hand, there is a rhythm that gives a subtle texture to the page and evokes other rhythmic actions: running, knitting, bodily actions built of muscle memory.

Fielden’s hand is uncannily steady but there are just perceptible differences in the zeros, some due to ebb and flow of ink in the Rotring technical drawing pen she uses. I image some of the zeros will have been narrowed by an in-breath, others fractionally enlarged. Let’s give this difference in size a name, say delta. Could I sample a section, measure this difference, delta, from the ideal width in each of the zeros in the sample, and calculate the standard deviation for every zero that will be drawn on the completed The Veil? Tempting, but it is more the evocation of these kinds of investigation – the mathematical and conceptual conjectures these drawings create that are to be enjoyed and explored.

At one point, gazing into The Veil, a rascally and unreasonable question bubbled up in my mind. No; I would not ask Emma if I could have a turn and try my hand at a few zeros. But back here is my Shed, I notice the ruled lines in my B5 Maruman notebook are 7 mm apart. The zeros in The Veil are set out in lines 1mm apart. I devise a test run, a sort of range finding hack – and I see I fit only three rows that stagger along, veering down at the end of the line, huddling in the middle, of varying diameters and degrees of roundness. I have rushed along, gleefully, so each small drunken zero has a devil may care rhythm, each affects the line below, some pushout others fall on their neighbours – they are more a crowd or a mob of zeros than an orderly number. They remind me of Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice saying to Lizzie, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” – and why does this come to mind. Is it that my haphazard zeros are eccentric, and eccentricity gives character which a zero should not have. Or should it? It does show that zero as a concept is practically infinite.

In a way Fielden reverses art’s allegorical tradition, the drawings in Approaching Zero are not tableaus of figures that allude or set up a metaphor about approaching zero, Zeno is not lurking in the background with a tennis ball, but here zero is both the signifier and signified, and from this position becomes, by aggregation and scale, a mesmerising textural surface, a meditation in making and observation, each ‘0’ an eyelet to thread a thought through.

At the same time The Veil deals concisely with the antique problem of art: the depiction of space, and the tension that exists between figures in a scene by the simple reiteration of zeros and the finely calibrated distance between each zero. Where the work lifts is in the synergy of the zeros. They shimmer on the paper – and in this embodied moiré pulse that seems to make the work float off the page, a sleight of hand that creates an illusion of three dimensions.

The Veil illuminates the paradox of how Fielden uncannily steps just over the sleeping dog of zero, and puts her infinitesimally small and adamant ‘1’ at a place that is close to but not the very furthest remove allowed by the page and the number of zeros she can fit on to head of her proverbial pin, each of a gossamer width. It lets us see the alliance between what is tending to the infinitely large and what is tending towards zero. Infinity is hard, if not impossible to imagine, but Fielden helps in this with her psychologically dizzying The Veil. If I look at it long enough, I feel like I’m looking into space.

            Return to Sender (4)

            You can be sure of death, and this:
            every poet will make up, for what it’s worth,
            a poem on stars, starlight, nebula or red dwarfs.
            But, mind the stars have got in first and made
            the poet, ink, pen and page from spare parts,
            with the caveat: return to sender.

COALESCENCE

We may be better at imagining we can imagine zero than we are at actually imagining it. All our fates are finite. However, the universe is a big place and to consider the infinite it helps, at least in imagination, to slip into the intergalactic. Fielden has a predisposition to astronomical and fluid states, themes central to her work, and in her videos as she prompts us to give, fluidity, infinity and the intergalactic more thought.

I met Emma Fielden in 2012 at a poetry launch. Fielden was wearing the best brooch, I asked her who made it and when said she had, I told her we were going to be friends. It was a prediction of a coalescence, I didn’t know that her art and my writing would share major themes of zero, the universe and infinity but the brooch’s exacting detail, fine execution and elegant design spoke volumes. Like Andromeda and the Milky Way our art practices were going to overlap.

In 1978 in the small northern courtyard of the Art Gallery of South Australia there was an installation; an oversized tap, and visitors would try to turn it on by the tap handle – these were the heady days when some art was interactive, but no amount of applied rotation to the tap handle effected the flow of water. There was a concealed button on the ground which turned it on, a timer turned it off. This very much confused first-time visitors as to when things started – sometimes water flowed when you approached the tap, sometimes when you backed off. It was about the kinetics of water and raised questions on beginnings and viewing art: it was puzzling but entirely open to anyone actually looking. There was a sweet spot of realisation. Coalescence does something similar. Video installations running on continuous loops can displace the viewer but the moment in Fielden’s Coalescence where you get the beginning is a Eureka moment, and here I admit to reversing it more than a few times so I could see the event set into motion.

To watch Coalescence is to be raised into a buoyant state of satisfied expectation; what is it about? For me it is as if I am embarking on a multiple choice exam which I have already passed with distinction, and there are no wrong answers, I can (a) watch it again, (b) sit down and have a good think about it, (c) ring up EF and talk to her about fluid dynamics and the big bang theory (not an option for readers) or (d) theorise that this is a retelling of how the universe was made, or maybe how night was made.

ANDROMEDA AND THE MILKY WAY

This performance video turns on the relationship between the galaxies Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself. Though to use the possessive ‘our’ in connection to the Milky Way does not seem in any way plausible. Fielden and the fellow performer Lizzie Thomson sit opposite each other in a corner of the universe, both with a pile of willow stick charcoal, drawing ever increasing elliptical spirals that grow closer and closer until they overlap. Like all the work in Approaching Zero this is discipline in blackness, each spiral of willow stick laves the ground with a dense velvety opacity, the application, to borrow from Keats, might be a study in charcoal’s negativity capability.

The action here proceeds with mild methodical, meditative serenity. It is Fielden, who I have nominated as the persona for the Milky Way, whose intense application creates a halo of carbon particles that spread out beyond the orbital lines of charcoal. In 2015 NASA’s Hubble Telescope mapped out Andromeda’s nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma. You probably know that the two galaxies are due to collide in about 4.5 billion years from now but in some places, according to the Hubble date, they may already be bumping halos.

When my son was eight he asked me if the Sun would blow up, and what would happen to us. After a bit of a chat and my pretty blunt assessment, he said well, this will ruin a perfectly good day on Earth. By extension, will the collision of Andromeda and the Milky Way ruin a perfectly good day in our part of the galaxy? It is hard to explain but I find this extremely funny in a kind of Douglas Adams way. The collision could severe a whole spiral arm off either galaxy before the two morph into a giant elliptical galaxy. The contemplation of these space events naturally turn on an astronomical scale, and by implication, raise the prospect of human extinction.

So far Homo sapiens have been on Earth for 200,00 odd years, a period of residency some 0.1% of that of the dinosaurs 175 million year reign, with the latter’s evolutionary highway a sudden dead end due to meteors. I admit to previously hinting of humans as a superior in the evolutionary stakes, a belief entirely unsupported by facts, seeing as humans have bought about more extinction than anything other than a catastrophic rain of meteors. It seems more likely that we will burn the planet up before the next meteor storm arrives or we get hit by bits of Andromeda.

Is Fielden suggesting our possible galactic demise in referencing the collision of Milky Way and Andromeda? In this quietly played out piece where we have some serious thinking to do, she does not impose an argument as to what we should think about astronomical events, rather her work acts as a catalyst for thought and exploration, suggesting that the present, as a time scale for thought, is due for a rethink, a philosophical shift.

Approaching Zero is above all a meditative and finely made prompt for metacognition. It in is an invitation to flirt with nothing, while wearing, with a nod to Edward de Bono, a hat made of stars.

¹ Carol Jenkins, The Zero Waits from ‘A History of Zero’, Xn , Puncher and Wattmann, Newcastle, Australia, 2016.

² Wislawa Zymborska, from ‘Born’, View with a Grain of Sand, Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, Great Britain, 1996.

³ The Shed is my writing studio in my garden, fancifully christened the Scriptorium this soon gave way to The Shed.

⁴ Carol Jenkins, Return to Sender, from Xn , Puncher and Wattmann, Newcastle, Australia, 2016.