Dissolve Coagulate Mollie McKinley

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Master of Fine Arts Thesis

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design

Division of Sculpture/Dimensional Studies

New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York

2022

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Mollie McKinley, MFA

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Coral Lambert, Thesis Advisor

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Joann Quiñones, Thesis Advisor

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Abstract

In both human bodies and ecology, healing is a layered experience known by its transformative outcomes. My work translates the slow, invisible process of

healing into textural, visual meditations. I make the invisible seen and felt through working with the elementals: dripping water, erosions of earth, material formed by ﬁre, and the ephemerality of air. These elements function as tools, substances, and subjects of the work. Their intelligences are my collaborators. To articulate these phenomena, I use combinations of materials: carved blocks of salt, blown glass, sheet glass, photographs printed on canvas and silk, handmade cotton paper, and neon. In addition to the visceral language of the elementals, my practice incorporates the ancient language of alchemy and the philosophical language of phenomenology as applied to current medical approaches to illness.

Informed by post-humanist perspectives on nature’s autonomy and traditions of earth-based spirituality, I draw parallels between the health of our earth as affected by climate change with the health of human bodies. Symbols of contemporary human medicine, such as infusions, intersect with the organic surfaces of nature in sculptures and photographs. The infusions are often represented as organic lines of neon, interrupting the romance of the pastoral.

The luminosity of neon, and the photographic ﬂash, become mystic illuminations towards envisioning a new future.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis committee, Joann Quiñones and Coral Lambert, for their generous support of this work, along with my faculty Sarah Blood, Angus Powers, Rebecca Arday, and Brett Hunter (emeritus); my gaffers and glassblowing assistants Henry Jackson-Spieker, Angus Powers, Misty Long-Donoho, Anthony Toomey, Alex Young, and Justin Spillers; and my partner, Noah Wagman, for his support of my research and studio practice.

This work would not exist if not for the land and the elementals themselves; I bow in gratitude to the place in Almond, New York known as Ledges, as well as to the indigenous people of the Alfred region, the Haudenosaunee.

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The atmospheric sky is close and palpable, hanging deeper towards the earth. The closeness lends a mysterious intimacy with the air and light. An unusual sensation, evoking a hushed ecstasy. This soft collision begins a partnership: I am seen and known by the primal and unknowable. The salted air creates a hazed lens, rounding all perceptions of space. The dense light furls up around the body, a discrete presence. A veil, a shroud, impermanence softening.

Light is an entity with sentience and mercurial moods; it speaks. Materialization of the ethereal, when the void illuminates to form, brings tender haunting.

Healing is a layered experience known by its transformative outcomes. My studio practice translates the invisible process of healing into visual meditations. I make the unseen visible and felt by working with the elementals: dripping water, erosions of earth, matter formed by fire, and the ephemerality of air. These elements function as tools, materials, and subjects of the work. Their

intelligences are my collaborators. To articulate these phenomena, I combine media into interdisciplinary works: carved and eroded blocks of salt, sheet glass, blown glass, photographs printed on textiles, handmade paper, and neon.

To embrace the multidimensional qualities of healing, my work uses a hybrid of three languages to create a cosmology. They are the visceral

vernaculars of the elements in nature; the ancient language of alchemy; and the philosophical language of contemporary phenomenology, as applied to current medical approaches to illness. My practice begins with a close look at the

autonomy, lyricism, and behaviors of the elements. I use the term ‘elemental’ as distinct from ‘element’ in my practice to refer to the autonomous and

metaphysical qualities of earth, air, fire, and water that exist beyond empirical

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science. This is the spirit of earthly phenomena. These elementals have their own languages, articulated by their material behaviors and emotional tenor. My interest in them is personal. The recent acceleration of climate shifts of the past decade have increased in tandem with the progression of my own experience with serious illness. Empathy for the earth and its own break with health laid the foundations for my current work. As I healed from cancer, I spent extended time in nature walking, sitting, observing, and listening as part of my process. Through contemplative relationships with ecological sites, the earth revealed philosophical and metaphysical lessons on transformation.

The elemental language is erotic, romantic, and driven by

body-knowledge. It is the satisfaction of clear water, dripping loudly from verdant, mossy ledges; it is the voluptuous shape of foam accumulating at the bottom of a waterfall; and it is the peacock-iridescent ground oil seeping up from the earth, blooming onto a muddy creek bank, poisonous and pastoral. The latter is captured in my first photographic sculpture, Illuminated Ground Oil Drip (2021).

As I photograph these details, elsewhere in the world climate change has incited the same elements to behave quite differently. Enormous glaciers and icebergs melt and drip, but then collapse into a dangerous dissolve with the land and sea.

Moisture becomes ferocious hurricanes, destroying cities and shorelines. Climate scientists attest that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to rising global temperatures, fueling the melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea

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levels, rampant wildfires, mass species extinction, and catastrophic weather events. ¹ Are the elementals angry with us?

Illuminated Ground Oil Drip (detail), 2021 Photograph on padded and cauterized canvas, neon tube filled with Argon and mercury 60” x 40” x 1.5”

1 “Selected Significant Climate Anomalies and Events: January 2022,” National Centers for Environmental Information, accessed April 20, 2022,

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202201

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Illuminated Ground Oil Drip, 2021

Photograph on padded and cauterized canvas, neon tube filled with Argon and mercury 60” x 40” x 1.5”

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Alchemy and phenomenology clarify and expand upon the impact of the elements and their relationship to healing. As a researcher of occult traditions, the complexity of alchemy appeals to both my material and healing practices.

Throughout my early stages of remission, I began to apply alchemical language to my developing sculpture practice. I still use this mystic tongue to describe transformative states that evade plain language. In particular, my new work uses the poetic aspects of the tria prima to describe embodiments of healing and phenomenological. Materially, salt, Sulphur, and mercury are central in Hermetic alchemy, known together as the tria prima ; which are important materials and symbols in my sculptures. ² For context, I work with Western, or Hermetic alchemy, which is rooted in ancient Greco-Roman Egypt and Islamic alchemy, and became the basis for modern chemistry and medicine. ³ Alchemy is not a metaphor within my work, it is a literal practice. I consider myself a contemporary alchemist, using materiality and magic to transform myself and the world around me, to envision new futures.

Salt, Sulphur, and mercury’s relationship to the elements is a key connection in my practice. In Hermetic alchemy, these three were used to

understand the human experience. The spirit is symbolized by mercury, the soul by Sulphur, and the body by salt. All exist in my practice, and especially salt.

Sulphur and mercury are typically referenced through color and material mimicry, such as in silvery pewter and deep yellows of blown glass color. Actual mercury

3 Holmyard, E.J. Alchemy. ( New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990), 15-24

2 Cheak, Aaron. “ René Schwaller de Lubicz and the Hermetic Problem of Salt .” (PhD diss.,

University of Queensland, Australia, 2011), http://www.aaroncheak.com/hermetic-problem-of-salt/ , accessed April 21, 2020

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and Sulphur are used as well; mercury plays a key role as the agent of bright illumination within a neon tube. The role of the tria prima relates to the larger goal of the alchemist, which is to transform and heal. Alchemy and mysticism scholar Christopher Bamford writes: “Above all the alchemist seeks in all things the healing, saving Ferment, the internal spiritualizing agent that underlines all transitory, discontinuous phenomena, the source

of the metamorphosis of the four elements.” ⁴

My practice is the embodiment of my hybrid worldview; a perspective on healing and of nature’s interdependence with all life forms. In active

transformation, tinges of the otherworldly arise as the familiar meets the

unfamiliar. A deeper look into saturated phenomena expands another layer of my visual language.

4 Wilson, Peter Lamborn; Bamford, Christopher; and Townley, Kevin. Green Hermeticism:

Alchemy and Ecology. ( Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2007), 45-46

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II. The Saturated Phenomena

The warm embrace of August humidity is my lover now. I am the same as the comfortable silence of the plants. This is the language that feels most like home. The light is my mother. In classical Western mythology, the sun is often categorized as male, but now it feels nurturing in a maternal way, giving life and softness and intense heat. It is overbearing and mercurial. It drapes

dimensional space with ease, and burns too hot some days. Maternal, yet of no gender. Anything with sunlight stretching across it becomes home. All elements are home, too; they speak in bearable registers. The superficiality of daily human language is brash; I feel annoyed. Touched by death and ego-collapse, any sense of self has dissolved. I feel genderless and ageless. In this way, the trees and rock sediment know me better than old friends do. Whatever “nature” is seems just as queer as I suddenly am. A new self is dawning, yet it feels fragmented and selfless and shifting. No fixed binaries exist. The front yard is filled with sweet, bouncing flowers and the density of rain. Comrades.

All phenomena involve a cause and effect relationship between action, perception, sequence, time, and consciousness. But as phenomenologist

Merlau-Ponty emphasized, phenomenology is not basic sense-data. ⁵ It’s not the greenness of the algae, nor is it the heat of the fire. It isn’t a state of

consciousness, but it is the arrival of being into consciousness . It is a dawning;

arriving at a transcendental field where many complexities are possible. For example, there are many sense-driven phenomena in my work, most obviously seen in the visceral drips, burns, intersections, balance, emissions of light within the materials. They are textural, almost tactile, in their ability to elicit a visceral response from the body, to rouse familiar yet uncanny feelings. We all know the coolness of dripping water on our skin, the pain of a burn, or the warmth of sunlight. These corporeal memories are stored in our bodies. A drip of slimy, wet

5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception . ( New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 4-5

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algae reviles the senses, as we, too, are reviled by the slimy substances our own bodies produce. The horrors of nature are the horrors of our own bodies, of inevitable seepage, disease, and eventual putrefaction. Can pleasure be found in the frothing slime, in the dark recesses? The work challenges a reconciliation with the grotesque edges of nature’s phenomena, inviting viewers to face the messiness of healing.

The sensations of illness that arise in the body, and the constant

movement of elemental activity within nature, share a common intensity. Māra Grīnfelde describes the arc of illness in phenomenological terms in her paper on medical health care philosophy. ⁶ She bases her study on a concept from French theorist and mystical theologist Jean-Luc Marion, who proposes the theory of the “saturated phenomenon.” Marion uses this phrase to describe the heightened experiences of illness, love, grief, orgasm, and divine revelation. Grīnfelde , in turn, applies Marion’s idea to the phenomenological arc of illness. She describes how the process of becoming ill changes a person’s consciousness. Grīnfelde names the phases in four separate stages that the sick person experiences; the most impactful are its disruptive and affective dimensions. She describes the saturations and their effect on the ill person’s sense of autonomy:

…illness in its essence is very similar to a variety of experiences, such as the aforementioned experiences of suffering, pain, agony, grief, joy, desire, orgasm, fear, anxiety, as well as the experience of God’s presence. All of these experiences are characterized by the excess of affections over the

6 Grīnfelde, Māra. “Illness as the Saturated Phenomenon: The Contribution of Jean-Luc Marion.”

Medicine, health care, and philosophy 22, no. 1 (2018): 71-83.

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intentional activity of the subject, by the transformation of the autonomous and active subject into the passive and receptive witness. ⁷

Saturated experience is so intense that the person experiencing it temporarily loses some or all autonomy, reducing their agency to a passive witnessing. This is a loss of control. This positionality of witnessing within a saturated experience is present within my photographic work.

For example, in my work Wart Fungi with Subcutaneous Cave Fat (2022), I harness the saturated phenomena of a body in illness by layering two visceral digital images. The primary, outer image depicts a bright yellow-green cluster of wart-like jelly fungus, with a single orb of water dripping from the cluster. I use a macro lens and flash of a DSLR camera to still kinetic wet phenomena with illumination. After working in large format film photography for 15 years, I transitioned to digital photography for this body of work. The digital allowed a more immediate relationship with time, artifice, and repetition. Captured mid-drip, the kinetic intelligence of the elementals are sensual, raw, and alive. I enlarge these small details to monumental size, scaling something that is often only a few inches in reality to over four feet tall as a printed image.

The digital artifice captures the self along with the fluid spirits of the elementals. In many of the images, the flash bouncing off the drips captures my actual eyeball reflected from the tiny mirror inside the single lens reflex camera, projecting it onto wet surfaces. Looking closely, one can see dozens of tiny eyeballs all over the surface of the bubbly fungus, and in a single drop of water

7 Grīnfelde, Māra. “Illness as the Saturated Phenomenon: The Contribution of Jean-Luc Marion.”

Medicine, health care, and philosophy 22, no. 1 (2018): 78-79.

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that is captured in the lower center of the image. My own looking becomes a part of the image, hovering like a mystic eye; a clue to consciousness knowing itself and merging with the thing seen. These details become important aspects of the work. At around sixty inches high and forty inches wide, the viscerality of the total work is immersive. The scale mirrors the dimensions of standing human bodies, functioning as an invitation to empathy and compassion towards the non-human.

Where human and elemental consciousness merge, a whole new consciousness is made, a collaborative saturation.

The work is printed on a heavy canvas instead of photo paper, the weight and wove providing a sculptural substrate. There are three organic holes cut in different areas of the primary image, effectively removing parts of the

background. Areas of another photograph emerge from behind these holes. Their placement in the background gives the illusion that they are somehow actually part of one cohesive photograph, or one cohesive hybrid-body. The image underneath depicts purple-blue clusters of dripping stalactites, damp and slimy.

Their placement under precise holes in the primary surface or “skin” creates the sense that we are inspecting a body under operation with multiple surgical incisions. The holes have opened to the body’s vulnerable interior. I position the viewer as the surgeon, looking down at the open body on the operating table; a sense of uncanny familiarity and saturation of anxiety might lead them to feel that this might be their body. The dripping stalactites seem as a layer of fat or muscle just underneath the skin’s surface.

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Wart Fungi with Subcutaneous Cave Fat, 2022 Padded and cauterized photographs on canvas 60” x 40” x .25”

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Wart Fungi with Subcutaneous Cave Fat (detail), 2022 Padded and cauterized photographs on canvas

60” x 40” x .25”

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Top: Detail of my eye reflected in the orb of a water droplet, and in multiples on wet moss Bottom: Detail of inset cave with cauterization at canvas edges

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The play of dimensionality, perception distortion, and discomfort contribute to the saturated phenomena of this work. The fluctuation between beauty and disgust, known and unknown, is the rhythm of the saturated phenomena itself.

This saturation always lands in the territory of hybrid, liminal, and new-being.

This is otherness; never manifesting in clear binaries. The grappling with positionality, with one’s sense of power and control, are parts of the illness arc that are activated in this work. Details of the cuts are important as well: I burn and paint all the edges of the incisions, which I refer to in medical terms as cauterizing. These burn marks curl the edges of the canvas, adding to the sense that the two images are part of one place, rather than an obvious collage. These incisions speak to the experience of illness-based trauma eroding the body and psyche. They simultaneously illuminate the disappearance of ecological health through climate crisis. The self dissolves, just as the earth’s health dissolves.

It is important to mention my motivations behind choosing the

photographic to embody the saturated phenomena. Traditional single-frame indexical photography lacks the multiplicity and complexity of the manipulation of space within the sculptural. Photography as a discipline is defined by acts of documentation and editing, and sometimes of creating theatrical tableaus to be documented and edited. Collage and sculptural photography are another progression towards a more deeply engaged manipulation of the indexical document. (Letha Wilson ⁸ and Basil Kincaid ⁹ are two contemporary artists who

9 Basil Kincaid, Collage, accessed April 21, 2022, https://basilkincaid.art/works/collage

8 Letha Wilson, Grimm Gallery, accessed April 21, 2022, https://grimmgallery.com/artists/25-letha-wilson/

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currently work in this lineage). The progression of the image into a soft sculpture takes the layered perception distortion further. The canvas and silk images are padded with quilt batting that strategically raise the surface of the image to intensify its topographic depth of field.

My work aligns with the field of soft sculpture by hybridizing the fields of photography, painting, sculpture, and textile. Superficially, there are the illusory qualities of painting and photography that historically set those disciplines apart from sculpture. A viewer must make sense of these disorienting images that are also objects. The depth of field in the photograph itself often makes the subject seem to protrude into actual physical space. I blur two-and three-dimensionality by taking the image into the realm of sculpture: I layer sheets of contoured quilt batting under the photograph, subtly raising certain parts of the work off the wall to emphasize the depth of field even more. Each soft sculpture has a black cotton duck backing, and is glued or sewn into place. The result disrupts the viewer’s ability to clearly place the work in a single discipline, instead focusing on the experience of the phenomena depicted and its presence as an object.

Using textiles aligns me with a lineage that gives voice to those who often feel at the margins, especially women, queer artists, and those who approach ideas of drippiness and in-between-ness. ¹⁰ Curator Lucina Ward of the National Gallery of Australia wrote in the exhibition catalog for the 2009 show Soft

Sculpture :

10 Ward, Lucina. Artonview. Canberra, ACT: National Gallery of Australia, 2009. 23.

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“From the 1960s, artists began to use cloth, fur, rope, rubber, paper, leather, vinyl, plastics and other new substances to make forms that are persistent rather than permanent. The choice of these materials emphasizes natural forces, such as gravity and heat, and in many cases have metaphorical or metaphysical implications. Soft Sculpture reveals the qualities of softness and plasticity in many ways and across a range of media: furry, pliable, visceral, even liquid.” ¹¹

I return to the idea of softness repeatedly across media, and it is made most literal within my textile-based sculptures. I approach the phase of initial photography as a soft space in which I am humbled in the presence of multiplicity, of interdependent and otherworldly life forms. There is wonder in discovering unfamiliar forms in nature. In this tender space of meeting the new, it is possible to befriend the saturated phenomena. Saturation does not have to be a negative or frightening experience, and can be accessed within the discovery of unusual forms and phenomena. This discovery is a crucial experience in my practice, and is a source of pleasure for my practice. Receptivity is also a form of soft surrender, an acceptance of loss of control. This surrender requires moving past the hypervigilance that stems from a traumatized expectation of worst case scenarios, typical of those who survive catastrophic illness or trauma. ¹² An open trust and humility must develop in order to begin the healing process, a rounding of hard edges. Softening is an artifact of healing.

12 Seungyeon Annie Yoon. “Neural Hypervigilance in Trauma-exposed Women.” (PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2018), 1-2.

11 Ward, Lucina. Artonview. Canberra, ACT: National Gallery of Australia, 2009. 20.

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III. The Process of Healing

Healing is a process of absorption, activated by sitting in the sun near the hydrangea bushes. A small wind ripples over your skin, rising up from the river. The crisp bed sheets, newly laundered, are a transformation chamber for after the sun. Rest is quenching, and never enough. From the open window, more wind rustles the hemlock limbs nearby; a dense and salty breath. A flickering spirit illuminates your slow limbs and movement, folding legs into the linens as the body turns to the cool side of the bed.

Memories of what came before appear and dissolve, hovering above a fuzzy fracture—the life before, and life after, colliding and parting, moving.

As a component of the saturated illness arc, healing is a process of collaboration with exterior and interior forces that repair the physical and psychological wounds of illness. In my own terms, healing is a physical, emotional, and cognitive process that repairs damage and fracture from

traumatic experience. My approach to healing connects trauma held within the body to our planet’s current illness, and looks to nature as a co-healer. The symbiotic nature of this relationship is not just theoretical: new scientific studies show an increase of cancer-killing T-cell production in our cells when we are in the presence of trees. ¹³ I take this idea a step further by proposing that this relationship is reciprocal.

We are capable of, and responsible for, healing the disease of the planet which we and our global kin have caused through capitalist climate devastation.

Yet from an artist’s perspective, healing is a phenomena that is hard to capture visually and through verbal language. Much of the biological healing process is

13 Li, Qing. “Effect of Forest Bathing Trips on Human Immune Function.” Environmental health and preventive medicine 15, no. 1 (2010): 9–17.

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unseen, happening within the depths of our cells. My work communicates

esoteric processes through symbolic and intuitive gestures. Cutting, eroding, and rejoining fragmented materials mirror the body’s healing processes. Biological healing dawns through murky, mysterious sensations in our bodies, some which may be altogether unfamiliar and even alien-feeling—another harbinger of the saturated phenomena. Unfamiliar feelings of the illness arc move towards healing when the sense of self dawns in new and often disruptive feelings. The ego is destabilized through the experiences of pain, nausea, panic, dizziness, or other signifiers of disease. Where does illness end and healing begin? My practice shares the in-between places where the boundaries and binaries of healing and illness are unclear.

As a survivor of lymphoma, my own experience with saturated illness drives my practice. The subsequent work arises from a developed phase of the healing process, cushioned by years of distance from the acute experiences.

From this vantage, symbolic materials can speak with a sense of refinement from the clumsiness from fresh, too-raw trauma. Eroded salt, blown glass, and the layering of photographic images with neon make aspects of the raw PTSD cohesive. My approach to these materials articulates the time, repair, a nd work required to heal from trauma. ¹⁴ My erosion of salt blocks poetically elicits the long timescales necessary to integrate saturated phenomena back into a new life.

The first sculptural work that emerged as a response to my illness was my series Salt Monoliths. The series is now in its third incarnation as Salt Cradle II ,

14 van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score : Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma . (East Rutherford: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014), 205-215.

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which currently integrates water-carved salt erosions with blown glass. The project unites these disparate materials into balance and cohesion. While the work has been in development since 2012, it took an accelerated turn after I was released from the hospital in 2013. The process of making the sculptures

mirrored the effects of illness on my body and psyche: force, pressure, and immediacy breaks down the solidity of the salt-body. Erosion, on a basic level, is the degradation of material. It is earth dissolved, removed, or lessened by natural processes such as water or wind. In the human body it is the degradation of tissue or bone. As my disease progressed, I became drawn to nature’s eroding forms as poetic embodiments of my own condition . In nature, erosion might be ecologically devastating, as with collapsing coastal dunes from relentless climate change storms. Sometimes it is a natural effect from the interaction of two forces throughout deep geologic time, such as the wind-eroded stone spires at Bryce Canyon National Park ¹⁵ and the warped sandstone of Arches National Park, ¹⁶ both in Utah. The contemplative beauty of these complex yet softened stone forms normalized the process of dissolution within my body.

Relational to these ideas, I use a traditional hammer and chisel along with a power-washer to carve fifty-pound salt blocks into organic, eroded sculptures.

The intensity of the water pressure dissolves the salt into perforated contours, erasing the industrial cube and creating complex holes, caverns, spires, and tunnels. These sculptures are small in scale, all under twelve inches, inverting

16 “Arches: A Story in Stone.” National Park Service. Last modified November 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/arch/learn/nature/geologicformations.htm

15 “Bryce Canyon: Hoodoos.” National Park Service. Last modified September 4, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/brca/learn/nature/hoodoos.htm

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and resisting the typical capitalist notion of a monolith as an object of huge scale.

My work instead approaches the monolith as a conceptual space; the enormity of healing, body, and time. The sculptures have a visual quality reminiscent of actual caves or exaggerated, osteoporatic bone; a macro and micro quality giving clues to how nature’s interior patterns are organized.

Body Heat Transfer , 2022 Charred salt and blown glass 9.5” x 9” x 12”

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Body Heat Transfer, 2022 (alternate view, top, and detail of burn, bottom) Charred salt and blown glass 9.5” x 9” x 12”

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In 2018, five years after my initial recovery began, I began incorporating kiln-cast and blown glass into the salt work. In the current iteration of the series, bubbles of blown glass cling to the salt structure. The glass component is

generally a similar scale as the salt, making them equal partners. I make the glass with a team, requiring a collaborative mindset similar to the one needed to navigate the medical industrial complex as a cancer patient. Both require clear focus paired with urgency. Running a team of glassblowers has a sweet

familiarity; it recognizes that neither my healing nor my practice happen in solitude. The illness and disability experience is often alienating, and the collectivity of glassblowing exalts a joyful hive-mind.

In the glassblowing process, I first design where the glass bubble will interact with the salt, and press it into that specific part of the sculpture with Kevlar gloves. A gaffer and assistant shape the glass ¹⁷ and continue to inflate it as I apply pressure, pressing it down. In this moment of material interaction, the high heat of the molten glass burns the salt, leaving deep-brown burn marks. The charring is an important signifier, an archive of intensity. It would be reductive to declare the burn mark as evidence of trauma, but the glass and the salt are fragments that seek cohesion together. Similarly, recovering from PTSD requires an interdimensional coagulation of disparate parts back into newfound

cohesion. ¹⁸ This balance-finding is the purpose of the healing process, and of the

18 van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score : Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma . (East Rutherford: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014), 221-222.

17 Among the talented gaffers and assistants I have worked with at Alfred University are Henry Jackson-Speiker, Angus Powers, Misty Long-Donoho, Anthony Toomey, Alex Young, and Justin Spillers.

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two materials meeting in a heightened state of saturation that alters them both permanently.

A recent example from this series is “Body Heat Transfer” from 2021. The bubble of glass fades from clear to alabaster white, giving the illusion of smoke near the burned salt, as if caught in the chamber. The bubble, not adhered to the salt, interlocks with it precariously, nesting upon a beak-like salt protrusion. It is held by the negative imprint of the form beneath it. The two materials are in relationship, converging on the burn that is partially obscured by the haze of alabaster. As irregular and organic as the salt is—open and perforated—the bubble is contrastingly succinct, enclosed in an egg-like form.

The cave-like salt erosions also elicit connections with long geologic time.

Rock and mineral formations that develop and dissolve over millions of years are mirrored in these erosions. The sculptures are made within an accelerated

process of several days, crafted from ancient minerals mined from the earth’s interior, blasted away with man-made tools. Healing-time is challenging to comprehend and control, as it doesn’t align with mundane, daily time. The temporal is always in visceral conversation with natural phenomena, especially light, as poetically described by author Margaret Visser:

“Salt, once isolated, is white and glittering. It is the opposite of wet. You win it by freeing it from water with the help of fire and the sun, and it dries out flesh. Eating salt causes thirst. Dryness, in the pre-Socratic system which still informs our imagery, is always connected with fire, heat, and light. ¹⁹ ”

19 Visser, Margaret. Much Depends on Dinner: the Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal . 1st Collier Books ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1988), 76.

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My work with salt and neon is resonant with Visser’s articulation of dryness, salt, heat, and luminosity. “Deep Earth Monolith” (2021) is a salt carving with a spear of candlelight white neon running through its holes. The light illuminates the salt from within. Cavernous contours reference long time, articulated through light and shadow. The work must be kept dry, so that it does not engage with the ambient humidity in the room and seep small puddles of salt water onto the surface below.

Deep Earth Monolith , 2021

Carved salt, candlelight neon tube filled with Argon and mercury 9” x 31” x 8.75”

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Top: Deep Earth Monolith (detail), 2021 Carved salt, candlelight neon tube filled with argon and mercury

9” x 31” x 8.75”

Bottom: Sunrise Over Resting Body, 2022 Carved & charred salt, blown glass, sunrise neon tube filled with argon and mercury,,

New York state-mined rock salt 13” x 24” x 21”

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IV. The Elementals & the Wet

My former self does not exist, and I do not recognize a new self. I am a veil, a sieve.

Self-less, I am free to roam. My body, now a channel for subtle magic, is a translator between the elemental and human worlds. Without a clear translation, the air falls into comfortable silence. The waterfall and I are old lovers, we don’t need to speak. We sit in the presence of each other, adoring casually as long partners do.

The elementals live within all humans as blood, breath, bone, and body heat. These parts of ourselves are also the core of an ecological system that is deeply damaged and in need of triage. The non-human life forms we share the planet with have intelligence that we cannot fully comprehend through our limited senses and cognitive abilities. Yet despite our perceptual limitations, the

non-human intelligences of nature deserve to be approached with restorative autonomy and care. ²⁰ My worldview embraces all that is not known, and seeks to learn the languages of the elementals and what they communicate.

My illness offered a unique, linguistic initiation that taught me to hear the non-human earth beings with some clarity. I learned to hear the mysterious sense-languages of my body as warnings, and I can now apply this deep listening to subjects besides my own body. This skill was initially developed during traumatic times spent in the hospital ICU during phases when the saturation of the illness arc was dialed up to an extreme volume. In order to continue living, I had to develop a new sense of finely attuned bodily-hearing. I learned to qualify the pitch of new and unknown sensations singing from my

20 Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene . (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2016), 34-37

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flesh. Once opened, this communication channel can perceive other subtle messages. This channel connects to the void itself—the great, dark womb in which all is unknown and unborn. It also is the channel of divine revelation, and the subtle line that connects to the elementals. This connection between the inner languages of the body and the languages of nature is described by the German mystic poet Novalis, who wrote in the late 1700’s: “Unknown and mysterious relations within our own body cause us to surmise unknown and mysterious states in nature; nature is a community of the marvelous, into which we are initiated by our own body, and which we learn to know in the measure of our body’s faculties and abilities.” ²¹

As I recovered, subtle forms of communication within nature suddenly spoke in registers I could hear with increasing clarity. The communication arrives in my consciousness as an immediate impulse or a slowly dawning realization.

Standing on the banks of the Hudson River on a tepid spring day, I may perceive an intense warmth and a sense of tender closeness. This might translate to, Relax, you’ll return to us when your human body is over. You, too, are a future landscape. We share bodies through many cycles of time. When listening to the elementals, these messages arrive in consciousness first as sensations in the body. Poetic phrases bubble up as interstitial states.

Of all the elementals, I have the closest ongoing dialogue with water.

Water holds much magic within its fluidity, receptivity, and tidal repetition, and it

21 Wilson, Peter Lamborn; Bamford, Christopher; and Townley, Kevin. Green Hermeticism:

Alchemy and Ecology. ( Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2007), 22.

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has been a partner throughout my life. My childhood was spent with water-landscapes, raised on the marshes and beaches of Cape Cod, the

indigenous Wampanoag lands. ²² On these waters, my Puritan ancestors hunted whales, and lived off the commerce of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, which produced glass from a factory on the town marsh. As an adult I settled in the Hudson River Valley, traditional lands of the Lenape people. ²³ The water of my body and the waters of the greater earth-body are interwoven in my practice:

lymphoma is considered a blood cancer, or a disease of liquid nature, often treated with liquid medicine (chemotherapy). ²⁴

My work in sculptural photography is in close dialogue with wet

phenomena. My work Froth Phantasm (2021) is a sculptural photograph with neon. This sculpture developed from my relationship with a local landscape in Western New York. I regularly visit a site in Almond, New York, known as Ledges.

It’s an unpublicized locals’ spot with public access from a side road, only known by word of mouth. It consists of a large, forked creek descending from

low-country mountains. The water flows over large, stone ledges of flat shale,

24 “What Is Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma?” American Cancer Society. Last modified August 1, 2018, https://www.cancer.org/cancer/non-hodgkin-lymphoma/about/what-is-non-hodgkin-lymphoma.htm l

23 “Territories by Land,” Whose Land, accessed April 21, 2022, https://www.whose.land/en/

22 Cultural research and reparations to these tribes can become a part of a healing plan for repairing the colonized relationship with the American landscape. Ecological healing should re-integrate traditional indigenous approaches to land management and an honoring of the interconnected sacredness of ecosystem health, with indigenous people leading. Communicating with the elementals doesn’t happen in a vacuum, nor does it happen without ethics. A key part of developing my communication with the elements has been learning a more reciprocal and respectful relationship to the earth. This effort inherently means a conscious effort to include actions that give voice to indigenous people, and to their cultural traditions that respect the earth.

This is a decolonial approach to our relationship with land.

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creating a series of small, lyrical waterfalls. The creek and its falls are flanked by riverbanks filled with dense moisture. Moss, ferns, and algaes thrive in the shadowed damp that surround the perimeter.

The waterfall paths make ornate trails of continual bubbles. The shapes of the froth are dynamic, thickened with bio-residue. Images appear in these foam shapes, appearing as glyphs to be interpreted. They are small and quickly changing, so they can also be easily overlooked or unheard. Simultaneously, many saturated micro-phenomena coexist in symphonic volume: glistening, dripping, rushing, evaporating, coagulating, dissolving. The vertical froth image for Froth Phantasm was edited from a selection of many similar macro images taken in succession with a flash.

The photograph depicts tiny bubbles of the froth with sharp clarity. The form appears as if alive, emerging from the printed canvas with its own agency.

The water it hovers over is clear; we can see the tannin-stained shale ledge underneath the surface. This flat bedrock underlays the entirety of the creek, with no loose sand or mud underfoot. The tension between the implied coolness of the water and stone is met by the warm line of radiant light of a neon overlay.

When I make the photograph into a soft sculpture for the wall, I soften the rectangular photographic frame by cutting it into an organic shape that looks like a loose puddle dripping towards the floor. The image itself is never digitally

altered, but the sculptural depth of field seems to emerge from the flat plane. The foam underneath the image subtly protrudes the most in-focus parts of the image towards the viewer’s eye, accentuating a feeling of life and motion.

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Froth Phantasm, 2021

Photograph on padded and cauterized canvas, neon tube filled with mercury and argon 56” x 35” x 2”

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Froth Phantasm (detail), 2021

Photograph on padded and cauterized canvas, neon tube filled with mercury and argon 56” x 35” x 2”

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Froth Phantasm is nearly 60” tall, placed on the wall so that the viewer can somatically relate to this fragment of earth-body. It may evade conscious

awareness, but viewers are intended to first experience the work as another body, eliciting visceral and empathetic responses. The holes in this work speak to the disappearance of land and wildness; the loss of species. Relational to the healing process, they reflect a loss of the self that existed before illness. They are evidence of what has been lost through trauma.

I design and bend lines of neon that interweave through the holes,

illuminating the absences. The neon is new energy flowing through the wounds.

It cleanses and illuminates a new future. Neon is technological as well as spiritual; it is the man-made and the otherworldly sacred illumination. It is a signifier of the commerce which has razed landscapes and become bright strip malls, while simultaneously humming with the alchemical distillation of noble gasses such as Argon. ²⁵ The neon line is a disruptive but essential infusion, delivering life-saving sustenance and medicine to the earth-body. Infusion lines, tubes, ports, blood transfusions, and blood draws were integral to my own healing from cancer. Integration of disparate aesthetics accurately reflects the complex task of the healing experience: making cohesion from dissimilarities.

My other light-based artworks approach the illuminated holes from

different vantage points. Inner Cathedral is an illuminated sculpture using stained glass. The sculpture depicts a cavern interior: millennia of calcified drips cover

25 “Industrial Gases From Air Separation,” National Energy Technology Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy. Accessed April 20, 2021,

https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/industrial

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the walls of the cave as organic mounds. Minerals and microorganisms create a wash of saturated colors over the contours. Blues, purples, and greens seem impossibly rich in color. The depth of field once again protrudes from the floor toward the viewer, as if the cave is sculptural rather than a two-dimensional plane. While the image was originally taken looking up into the ceiling of the cavern, it is now oriented on the floor so that the viewer appears to be looking down into the earth.

Rather than filled with neon tubing, the holes are illuminated from behind (a light box, unseen, 3” off the floor). Smoky stained glass fills several spaces, with wisps of color as ghostly veils. Other holes are filled with handmade paper, created with cotton pulp, cellulose dye, and salt inclusions. These mimic the color and texture of the algae-like drips on the cavern wall. At times it is unclear what illuminated voids are part of the image; there is a subtle disorientation, a soft unknowing. What elements are part of the original image, and what is part of the new sculptural collage, are blurred. There is a sense of worlds slipping into each other, as if moving from consciousness into sleep.

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Inner Cathedral, 2022 Installation view (above) and detail views of stained glass (bottom left) and handmade paper (right) Photograph on padded and cauterized canvas; handmade paper from cotton fiber, salt, & cellulose dye; stained glass; fluorescent tubes; aluminum light box; plywood

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This atmospheric unknowing is part of the transformative healing

experience. It is the floating free fall of multidimensional repair that creates a new self. The alchemical, philosophical, phenomenological, and elemental languages that converse around my work decipher the alien space awash between known and unknown. The material languages of salt, blown glass, neon, photography, soft sculpture, and papermaking articulate the tactile sensations of being deep within the saturations of the unknown. My consciousness remakes the world through a new hybrid language. Moving through the arc of illness builds new interdisciplinary cosmologies, and a new vision of the human body and the earth body.

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Dissolve Coagulate Installation Images

Solo MFA Thesis Exhibition, Turner Gallery April 30-May 3, 2022

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Bottom: Sulphuric Inflation with Petrol Haze, 2022 Carved and charred salt, blown glass

12” x 16” x 15”

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Bottom: Illuminated Stone Spirit, 2022

Carved and charred salt, burned blown glass, concrete, mason pigment, lath, neon tube filled with argon and mercury

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Bottom: Butter Sulphur Smoke, 2022

Carved and charred salt, blown glass, New York state-mined rock salt 18” x 22” x 34”

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Fountain That Dissolves Itself, 2022 Photograph on padded, salt-encrusted canvas, salt water, plywood, founatain pump, carved salt

13.5” x 40” x 95”

Dissolve Coagulate Mollie McKinley - AURA - Alfred University