Helen

 

Mary Hickman

Helen is of course that Helen of Sparta. Helen of Troy. Helena hated of Greece. In a dream or trance she left Troy. She finds herself in Egypt. You must be patient, remembering. You can choose where. We are going to see whatever we haven’t seen and maybe that means traveling down instead of across. Some say Taiwan gets better surf than China’s southern beaches because it is out in the Pacific Ocean and exposed to larger swells. We camped at Bai Xia Wan. Soon Helen’s skin peeled off in one snaking tube, leaving behind pink stinging surface. I lived in the south and there were always rich oil kids around. One of the great things about Taiwan, something not really true of China, is that there are a lot of small beaches where you can surf on your own. You have to watch the weather. Once, at Bai Xia, I tried to save a surfer who was drowning. I tried desperately to save him for almost twenty minutes but he didn’t make it. Paradise, that idea of being together, of fusion or whatever it might look like. Here there is peace. For Helena. Helena hated of all Greeks. For Helen, the ocean is a way to talk about raw force. Of course, the deep sea is unknown. “More people have traveled into space than have gone down to those abyssal depths,” she says. This work is work I made as we tread. While out on the coast, I kept cutting into the work, drawing over it. After living overseas for more than a decade, I had been altered in the way I had to be altered in order to enter a new lexicon, to become at once a “one” and “not one” of local culture. Whatever happened to me, I never felt out of place, like I shouldn’t be here, in this vertigo of inducing. A female traveler is a jewel-encrusted fan: Helen. She’s standing on the beach but the beach has turned to scrub brush or the tide is just out and silver is beneath the water. She sheds a silver snakeskin, broken speech. We see life and call it beauty. It is magnificent, wonderful. And remembering this scene, I see fever in her face. The sheen is so plasticine it recalls salt-eaters, salmon en croute, inky saturation, smudges, staining. It retells our whole history, a record of perforations, la parlourde, la morue, coquille St. Jacque, le filet de plié, and each notation we put in place so that we remember. Who are we? Who directs us? And after traveling so long together? Yes, it’s this voluminous nothing that at the time is very real but later, trying to hold it still for a moment, it’s then that we have reached for, or that we are straining toward, some first sight of home.

From Rayfish, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Hickman. Used with permission of the author.

Eva Hesse

 

Mary Hickman

I have to be strict with myself. I want to say “fluency” or “ecstatic grammars” but I try not to be swayed by fiberglass, cylindric columns inflating and deflating, iron mesh that trails cords and petals across the floor. Resin, vellum, wax—they are translucent, skin-like. In sunlight, the sculptures warm and glow. They take on the look of light penetrating the thinner parts of our bodies, ears or hands. She conjures life and it is formal. “That’s why I think I might be so good,” she says. “I have no fear. I take risks. I have the most openness about my art. My attitude is most open. It is total freedom and the will to work.” Eva Hesse had a stepmother named Eva Hesse who had a brain tumor two years before Eva. She got out of the hospital two years to the day Eva went in. The same hospital and same doctor. In three years, two people unrelated but with the same name? Well the story goes on. In this work, she ties the frame like a hospital bandage as if someone has broken an arm. A rigid umbilical surrounds the frame. It’s composed of malleable metal. Could it expose a body? We want to know what went wrong, in the cellular, the microscopic parts, in the lipids and tissue. Out of domestic reflexes my body surrounds itself. But the body ultimately stays what it is: combines of organ, bone, tube. It resists all sense. This first sculpture resembles dried intestines pulled through wall. Catgut used to string instruments will last two thousand years and carry a fresher song. It’s very moving, visceral of course, but restrained. As vellum’s dried hide insists that there is time to consider its shape, the shape itself decays. Several of Eva’s sculptures have deteriorated. They are no longer their original selves. They cannot be handled or installed as before. Consider a sculpture that, when first made, is softly draped, understated, organic, erotic, like the meninges, the protective tissue just under the skull, and is now a rigid, tawny heap. Maybe what I really want is a round table discussion about conservation. If you cut out a sizable cube of brain it retains shape, more or less. We see the pattern develop. She only had a few hours left to live. There was so much pressure. The whole brain tipped over and all the intelligence is in the front. I’d like to try a material that will last. So many of Eva’s raw materials are casting materials. But why think about them as casting materials? Imagine, instead, she makes the sculpture directly at the moment from each pliant or resistant shell. Although it’s fragile, all Eva’s work is tactile. The work has momentum. In Vinculum, everything is tenuous, knotted loosely, and can change. And I don’t mind that, within reason. The work holds its tension even as the sculpture flexes, moves, and pours itself back into water. It is a life but of the most bizarre kind. Does it cry? Or grieve? Does it sting? Does it lie? Non-organic, but place your hand upon its hide and feel the waters riot, witness ecstatic grammars, fluent hands and a breaking, strong current and waves.

From Rayfish, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Hickman. Used with permission of the author.