Nancy Fouts and the heart of the matter
[ by Charles Cameron — Nancy Fouts, sculpture, juxtaposition, essence of creativity, pocket universes, Arthur Koestler, Mark Turner ]
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Nancy Fouts is an American artist based in London. I ran across her work a while ago thanks to Michael Weaver on Google+, and was immediately struck by the intensity of her images, each one of which seemed like a landmark from a larger geography, more precisely focused and dense with meaning than our own world usually appears to be.
First impression:
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The first image I saw was of a snail on the straight edge of a razor blade (above, left) — an image out of the script of Apocalypse Now to be sure, but presented by Fouts in sharp detail and unadorned by any other context, visually, direct from eye to mind and heart.
This may be the image many people first see of her work — very, very striking, exquisite, terrifying if you allow it to be so, and yet as clear and simple, almost, as a single drop of water on a leaf.
Singer and song:
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But it was this next image that conquered me:
The juxtaposition is impeccable: sewing machine, record on turntable – and the overlap between the two, the link, the vesica piscis between them, is the needle.
The music of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi — particularly on harpsichord — has been disparagingly called “sewing-machine music”. If that phrase gave rise to this marvelous image, perhaps the slight can be forgiven.
The sewing-machine? It’s a Singer. And in what must surely be an ironic, gender-influenced choice coming to us from an artist so assured and exacting — the music that the needle draws from the groove of the record is, as you can tell from the record label, the music of His Master’s Voice.
Philosophical aside:
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I have pointed before to this diagram from Mark Turner‘s The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity, based on those in Arthur Koestler‘s The Act of Creation (eg those on pp 35 and 37):
It shows the essence of the creative act — the “release of cognitive tension” that occurs when some form of analogy, similitude, overlap allows the mind to join conceptual clusters from two fields in a “creative leap”.
Nancy Fouts’ work doesn’t merely make use of such twinned field overlaps, it makes twinned fields with overlap the defining quality of her works.
She is aiming right at the heart of the creative process. And it shows.
Moving further afield:
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