Threshold I
From To Guide Shadows, TUD Grangegorman, 2023
Thresholds to the Unseen, Laura Harvey-Graham, Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN), Nov-Dec 2024.
Emily Waszak: The Land and Others, Including the Dead review: Intimate reflections on ritual, grief and meditative transcendence, Tom Lordan, The Irish Times, April 2, 2024.
RDS Visual Art Awards 2023: Bold, entertaining exhibition shows strength of young Irish talent, Tom Lordan, The Irish Times, December 11, 2023.
To Guide Shadows
Review by Diana Bamimeke
In his 2010 book The burnout society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han has choice words for modern life. To him, contemporary society produces and, seemingly, celebrates the neuroses, mental illnesses and other cognitive disturbances that altogether characterise burnout. The world moves at a totally untenable pace. It’s catapulted us into what Han calls “achievement society”, a state of affairs that demands overproduction and overcommunication from us at all times, that functionally excludes stillness and contemplation.
Installed in a decommissioned Church of Ireland church on the edges of a university campus, To Guide Shadows is a show of untitled handmade objects, organic materials and sculptural textiles that wholeheartedly foregrounds this stillness. These works, assembled by Donegal based artist Emily Waszak and marking the conclusion of her studies on the MA Fine Art programme at Technological University Dublin, attend solely to ritual. A small printed booklet accompanies the exhibition; in it, Waszak asks the viewer to participate in ways they find meaningful: “... to sit, pray, chant, move, meditate, light a candle, weep, laugh, sing, be.” Crucially, “objects can be touched”. Distances collapse. Individual gestures and movements meld together and become a practice.
The most striking visual aspects here are undoubtedly the large-scale weavings that punctuate the central space of the church. They hang serenely from dark-coloured wooden slats, allowing the viewer to experience them in their totality, to circle them again and again in meditative movement. They invite further looking too, revealing dynamic textures: one piece, placed in a smaller, adjoining room, starts with a uniform grey weave. On the way down, the surface erupts into loose bundles of threads teased out from their weft and warp. Darker fabrics take their place, a mixture of woven and nonwoven textures thronging by the inch. From the hem threads hang delicately, removed from the upper tumult. This isn’t the only way Waszak disrupts the textile plane. At the centre of each woven work is a thin vertical opening, through which a sliver of light can be seen. These openings give the viewer pause; from a distance, just the woven surface is visible. Up close, however, expectations are turned on their head. A new meaning arrives via this aperture, and we get the impression of a boundary, like a window or a gate. By looking through, we’re introduced to the possibility that this view is only one of several, that the perceived “other side” might actually be ours. Fittingly, Waszak names these slitted textiles “thresholds”, which “hang as a pliable plane, a liminal, temporal gateway between realms, activated by ritual encounters…”
These textiles aren’t unique to this exhibition, nor are the artist’s concerns with the significance of ritual. Waszak’s Grief Weaving project, begun in 2020 and comprised of small-scale designs, chronicled her reckoning with sudden loss: the repetitive motions of the frame loom promised comfort and a return to groundedness. Eventually, these motions coalesced into something that resembled order, which then became ritual. Over the course of two years Waszak created forty of these designs, simultaneously documented on a dedicated Instagram account. Now, in 2023, we can read these works as the emotive and conceptual ancestors of the fabric forms we find in the exhibition. If these “expressions of love and pain”, as she writes, were a container for her grief, then To Guide Shadows is certainly its spillover, the overflow of great feeling writ large.
“A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.”
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1988
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On the far left wall of the church, three square polished brass plates are shelved and arranged beside one another. Impressions of pressed seaweed have been singed into their surface. Naturally, you look for yourself in anything reflective. But these impressions of ourselves are disrupted by the plates’ inhabitants. Again, our view is subtly challenged, like with the narrow clefts of the hanging textiles. Elsewhere, two vertical seaweed prints are displayed. Spurts of black pigment varying in size together form the outline of large seaweed fronds. In a move that evokes a sense of boundary or threshold, Waszak has printed these organic forms on paper frequently used for shoji, a type of latticed window, door or room partition found in traditional Japanese architecture. A visitor engaged in their own ritual in the space might brush their fingertips against a bundle of rushes or potted horsetails. They might palm one of the rocks or seashells placed at the foot of each weaving and feel the heft of the geologic time that shaped them, a time that cannot be exchanged for or governed by capital. They might tug gently at a braided skein of yarn slung over this wooden frame, or piled beside that large branch. Everything in this show has its place in the circuit of ritual movement. This kind of intentional placement of objects, each one with its own story, recalls the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism; an observation that’s made more pointed by To Guide Shadows’ venue. But this method of arrangement was not invented by the Christian tradition. We can glimpse examples of this in cultures ranging from the Rapa Nui whose ancient monumental statues face inland on what is now known as Easter Island, to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Ireland who deposited precious gold items in waterlogged areas. Globally and historically, people have always acknowledged the mysticism of places, not least Waszak herself, who is of Japanese descent.
Personal and cultural histories overlap most notably in a looped soundscape of Buddhist chanting that plays in the adjoining room on the right of the church’s nave. A deep, barely modulated voice—accompanied by the occasional beat of drums and tolling of bells—recites a sutra. The audio was recorded during the artist’s visit to the temple of Ennoji in Takeo, Japan. Now, its proximity to the hung multi-textured weaving makes clear the show’s occupation with ritual, and eases the listener’s slip into a meditative state.
It would be remiss of us not to acknowledge the vein of anti-capitalist thought running throughout the works assembled here and throughout the actual logic of their assembly. It borrows largely from another of Byung-Chul Han’s texts, The disappearance of rituals (2019), where he has more choice words, this time for the relentless tide of global capital. “Capital never rests,” Han says. The ordinary person is leashed to a constant exchange of currency and information upon which their social and economic wellbeing depends. So what does it mean to inhabit a space not organised around this constant? How will a person feel when their personhood isn’t bound up in what they can produce and in what they can spend, but is—for only a moment—relieved of the capitalist burden? Far from complete answers, To Guide Shadows instead imagines new rituals for a better world. A seat on a cushion to which we are invited mirrors how we might prioritise restfulness in this future. The grasp of our hands on a glazed clay bowl made by the artist closes the gap of alienation.
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Throughout To Guide Shadows, the sense we maintain of the outside world, of our secretly half-hearted commitment to the terms of a punishing “achievement society”, begins to dissolve. The inner and the outer rhyme for once, if only for a visit’s duration. As Han writes, the ritual encounter is a way of making us feel at home in the world, a feeling that historically and contemporarily has been denied to so many. The show distils this feeling through its organic and object offerings and impresses it upon the viewer, who leaves the church quieted, aware of the immediate moment. It strives for a grounded present, for a willing residence with the now and all its pains, losses and indignities. It also asks you to imagine how this present might be managed into an equal or better society. And in doing these, we can begin to mount full-throated defences of our lives, which have for too long risked being claimed by the parasitic principle of capital.
WORKS CITED
Byung-Chul Han, The burnout society, 2015. Translated by Erik Butler. California: Stanford University Press.
Byung-Chul Han, The disappearance of rituals: a topology of the present, 2020. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Emily Waszak, 2023. ‘Grief Weaving’, Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN), 1 July, p. 11.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 2019 (first published 1988). London: Ignota Books.
Grief Weaving
Emily Waszak
Published in Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN), July-August, 2023
I turned toward ritual through grief – profound grief in isolation – and desperation, which I imagine is a common enough path. When the sudden, unexpected death of my husband during the first Covid-19 lockdown left me completely alone in the extreme pain and sheer panic that grief brings, I looked for something to contain my grief. Ritual practice became that container. The only activities that could bring me back into my body were ritual chanting and weaving. During this time, unable to engage the future in any meaningful way, I began a series of small, automatic weavings, expressions of love and pain, which I called ‘“Grief Weaving’”.
Mirroring the way grief moves and shifts through the body over the passage of time, the scale and trajectory of my work has also evolved. My work is concerned with building ritual imaginaries as anti-capitalist resistance, weaving thresholds to the unseen worlds of our loved ones and our ancestors. Reclaiming ritual requires a slowing down and contemplation of other, better worlds. The first step in building is imagining. To this end, I have been making objects of imagined rituals, starting from archetypal object forms. When assembled, these ritual objects activate the space, creating ritualised environments through which to view traces of the unseen.
During my time as Artist- in- Residence at Dublin City University (DCU), I developed a workshop called ‘“Ritual Objects, Ritual Imaginaries’” in which the participants create ritual objects from found materials. Through the creation and use of these objects, participants examine what ritual can tell us about the kind of world we want to build. Ritual acts are prefigurative acts.
My practice is a sculptural practice, grounded in the soft logic of textiles. With a background in industrial weaving, I use textiles as a medium through which to reframe and revalue feminised, reproductive labour. My practice is material and embodied, interacting with waste, found and natural materials collected from sites of industry, abandonment, and the natural landscape. These materials and objects have an active interiority that I seek to engage through making and installation processes. Repetition is also a key element of my work, from the repetitive under/over rhythm of weaving, andto the making and remaking of object forms, to the daily practice of ritual acts.
As a migrant artist of Japanese descent living in Ireland, I have long struggled with how to present my work to a predominantly white Irish audience while remaining true to myself and my artistic vision. I do not want to perform my cultural identity for the white Irish gaze, nor do I want to hide it away. My work is deeply informed by my Japanese heritage, but it is not a literal performance of it. It is the lens through which I understand the world. I am inspired by my Japanese culture, even as I am situated in the wild, rural landscape of Donegal. In ‘“Shadow and Fold’”, a recent exhibition at Arts Itoya in Takeo, Japan, I incorporated small stones from my local beach in Donegal alongside the ceramic and textile objects I created using traditional Japanese materials.
Over the past year, I have been fortunate to have engaged in a series of crits with artists and curators as I slowly re-emerge into the post-covid world. Out of these sessions, my MA research into ritual and making, and my recent residencies in DCU and Arts Itoya, comes a new body of work, to be exhibited in the Regional Cultural Centre in my husband’s hometown of Letterkenny, opening Friday, 22 September. This solo exhibition opens on 22 September andalso marks the beginning of a supported relationship with between myself and the RCC, which will unfold over the next three years. I am so grateful for the kindness, patience, and artistic support I have received from so many people, while struggling to come to terms with loss and grief.