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The key themes of my art practice are time, memory, and temporality of human life. I am interested in how humans live their lives and perceive their existence. My aim is to capture the intangible, the fleeting matters that constitute human life.
The main theme of this series is aging as an existential phenomenon every human has to face sooner or later. It is charging at you like Ionesco’s rhinoceros at full speed but people mostly prefer not to notice. Then comes a day when the realisation of this inevitable process strikes them unexpectedly. It often hits its first blow with the first wrinkles, grey hair, a patch of baldness, knee aches. People get confused, upset, flabbergasted by this discovery. These deep unsettling feelings often go unrecognised, unidentified and brushed off with all the might. Aging is a precursor of death and the first definitive signs of aging are the reminders of inevitability of the end. People’s aversiveness to the topic is the psychological mechanism that emergency launches to protects our psyche from the realisation of our own mortality.
I first encountered death in my early twenties with the suicide of my brother. Then one by one I lost few more close people from my family, including my father. Each summer for the last four years I fly to my hometown to attend a funeral of a family member. Since the first encounter, I am fully aware of death and I set myself an existential exercise to notice it and not to look away. I integrated it into my practice. Whenever I see a dead animal (it happens often on countryside dog walks), I bury it. And I take a picture to remember. It is my memorial service of some sorts for the unnamed creatures whose memory no one would keep but me.
In the last decades the average life expectancy is steadily growing due to the improvement in so many areas of people’s lives and to the development of society towards humanistic values. Transhumanistic movement sets goals for the whole humanity to enhance longevity and cognitive and physical capacities with the help of science and technology. Isn’t it a dream cherished by humanity throughout centuries to prolong life, to stay young and to defeat death itself? Aging has become a key subject of rigorous scientific research.
Gerontology and geriatrics that closely study aging have recently seen a few scientific break-throughs. Elizabeth Blackburn, an Australian female scientist, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery and further research on telomeres, whose shortening is closely connected to cellular health and aging.
There is a cultural shift as well that is observed in a wider public. With more and more population becoming older public interest to this topic is growing too. It encompasses not only the older generations but also younger people who foresee their future and are getting curious. The viral popularity of aging apps demonstrated it clearly. In 2019 only a very lazy person or the one without a smartphone didn’t try to see how he or she would look like in 30-40 years.
One of the first most striking signs of growing old is grey hair. It doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps in on you slowly. Hair by hair it grows grey until you finally notice. The societal pressure to look young is stronger on women than on men. And the toll it’s taking on them is heavier. I noticed it in my circle of girlfriends. Once you become a certain age the discussions of grey hair break in more and more often. Each time they are started by someone new who discovered their first grey hair. Of course, they’ve heard it happen to other people and somehow yet they didn’t expect it to happen to them.
Breathe, keep breathing
Don't lose your nerve
Breathe, keep breathing
I can't do this alone
(Radiohead, Exit Music (For a Song))
When it does happen, the overwhelming feeling a person is experiencing is the fear of death itself. But we don't recognise it and don't call it this way. When this happens, a person is faced with three options. Leaving the grey hair be, dyeing hair, or plucking the grey ones out. Everyone is aware consciously or subconsciously about what’s expected of them by society – to age well, to stay young as long as possible at all costs. So, most women dye or pluck grey hair. When they pluck, they discard grey hair as soon as possible in order to forget. It becomes a ritual. After all, for centuries practices related to death, along with birth and coming of age, have been and still are highly ritualised. Humanity invented rituals to deal psychologically with its own mortality.
I chose to collect my grey hair. I’ve been collecting it out of curiosity first. I kept it as the symbol of passing of time. Then I turned to it as a interesting material. Since the focus of my practice is on capturing the elusive and untouchable matters like memory and time, I’m drawn to the materials that are not permanent and are degradable by nature. I was deeply impressed and immensely moved by the artworks of Francis Alys - Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing) (1997) and When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Melting ice or sand that will be moved back or around by the wind sooner or later are as poetic and evoking as paint and marble. The futility of efforts as you see your work disappears in front of your eyes is heartbreaking and at the same time therapeutic. This is what happens in life and you have to face it and accept it.
I chose embroidery as a method of work on this series because for a long time it has been seen as a mainly female activity and minor craft. And in a way I meant it as a tribute to the embroidery traditions of famous British female artists Ann MacBeth and Constance Howard. I tested a few various embroidery techniques I remembered from my childhood. Since hair is very fine and makes a tricky material, some of techniques turned out to be unsuitable and had to be abandoned. However, some minimalistic and simplistic stitchwork seemed to work and felt as appropriate. Especially in the work where I tried to re-create the process of measuring and counting the hairs by placing them next to each other according to their length.
I chose a simple black fabric to make canvasses for my works because it reminded me of the iconic painting “Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich. Its perfect void stripped of everything unnecessary has always appealed to me as a perfect space calling to be filled with something that is real, crucial, something that mattered. I always saw is as a real-life embodiment of “the heart of darkness”, taken from the eponymous book by Joseph Conrad, a place where we keep our darkest secrets and fears.
Two works of this series are small installation pieces made of the same black fabric embroidered with grey hair and magnifying devices. My aim was to re-create the actual process of the unpleasant discovery, of moving in closer and looking closely to see whether that’s what you really are seeing. Also, with age your eyesight naturally starts failing and eventually you might need one of the magnifying devices for poor sight.
Although that sounds dumb
And words are futile devices
(Sufjan Stevens, Futile Devices)
Using words directly in this series was an experimental step for me. Previously, I lived by a quote from 19th century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev “a word spoken is a lie” meaning that words can never express the truth in its entirety, they only try to describe it. Art, on the contrary, express the inexpressible where words fail. My personal taste in art never included artworks containing words or text. Derrida and Heidegger’s term “sous rature” – “under erasure” led me to avoid words and erase any hints of text in art. However, last year I witnessed the political turmoil and protests in my home country Russia and I was amazed how political art blossomed everywhere in the streets in the shape of words. It struck me that one can actually put what one thinks or feels directly into words and it worked. So, I ventured to try using words in my works and see what happens.
The series consists of two canvasses to be hung on a wall and two small installations placed next to the wall on white tables. I arranged all four works along one wall. Since the grey hair used in the series all were mine, I hung the two canvasses at the height of my head.
Bibliography
Baars J. (2012). Aging and the Art of Living. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Franks M. Lecture on Hauntology, MA Fine Art, Camberwell College, UAL, 2021.
Krystal A. Why we can’t tell the truth about aging. The New Yorker, Nov. 4, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/why-we-cant-tell-the-truth-about-aging.
Tanner G. (2020). The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. Zero Books.
Woodcox A. Aristotle’s Theory of Aging Adam Woodcox. Cahiers Des Études Anciennes LV, 2018, pp.65-78.