Personing. ‘Why must we assume that this shaping hides a body? Why not instead take this shaping for what it is, as the event in itself, an event that includes a body-world co-composition? What if instead of assuming that the person is not the shape, we were open to a different concept of personing that included its architecting?… Look again, this time refusing to abstract body from shape. See the personing as the architecting and refrain from selecting out from the emergent shaping the contours of the body’s skin-envelope. See the shape for what it is: a new contouring. Acknowledge this tendency to see textile as that which covers and not as a materiality in its own right. Then see textile in the moving, as an active shaping of what a body can do. See textile as an ecology of practices that is not separate from the body it clothes. And now wonder at the ways you have become capable of abstracting the one from the other (and then wonder about how you abstract the sitting body from the desk, the walking body from the street, the sleeping body from the bed).’ – Excerpt from The Minor Gesture by Erin Manning (2016).
‘Can you think of something that links eroticism with movement?’ Francesco asks.
‘Clay sculpting, without a doubt,’ I respond.
A few days later, I’m in his office at Marni’s headquarters, which I’ll adapt as my studio for some time.
Shaping. On my first day here, I touch the clay, battling against the harshness of three squared blocks of earth, one stacked on top of another. What I have in my mind is yet to appear. I hold on to it as a kind of memory. It will come back to my sense of touch in the near future.
Once I place the blocks appropriately, I begin to remove layers until something resembling legs appears, timidly. From now on, it’s a play between seeing and touching which informs my beliefs.
What does sculpture mean to me? It is just that: the rendering of imagination through the means of desire.
The clay dictates my time. Its generous, available and sensual qualities transform into an inexorably ageing form, entirely mineral, and yet so uncannily tied with the laws that determine decay in the realm of the organic.
On the second day, I already feel a pair of quads stretching under my hands, with calves squished under the glutes. The pose begins to narrate a story.