Jason Hendrik Hansma

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There is nothing that falls and is forgotten. When an object falls, energy is transferred to the floor and a repositioned framework is created. A constantly shifting, perpetuating and unbroken transference morphing into new forms where one only need observe, participate and join in the movement.

Deciding to participate in movement, rather than believing in the creation of energy, is making and this is where it all begins.

It is important to partake and negotiate with this repositioning energy. By signing the contract, we agree to assist and collaborate with the materials’ inevitable nature. This participation must be what people speak about when they refer to the phrase ‘having a practice’. To regularly work with this movement and have a dependence on the material is recognizing and allowing its request to speak.

With the most recent work ‘Of meteorites and pearls’ there was this kind of energy to the revealing of the work. It followed a natural and continual flow, which felt like collaboration with material rather than a process of making work from the ground up.

Given a meteorite in 2009 by a geologist friend of mine. I decided that it would go in my suitcase when I moved to a studio overseas. I took it to different studios with no direct intention to link it to a work. This lack of intention transferred the meteorite into a personal object that lived with me. Suffice to say, without a good reason it was out of bounds to be used.

This transference of intention changed the object into something similar to personal photographs, as they for me exist within their own realm. In fact for a number of months it was kept next to personal photographs on a windowsill of my studio, the sky the background from where the rock once came.

Around this time I re-read Shakespeare’s Tempest (I.2) and in particular the following lines which Ariel sings.

Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange.

I became interested in a movement of diving or dipping your head under the surface of the water to observe an underwater space. The exception being that my eyes be made of the same material as what you were viewing, such as pearls. If you take into account that our eyes are made of 50 percent water it makes this theory of mine 50 percent possible and thus half full.

I’ll have to go on a tangent here to explain the second part of the work and my reasons for showing the meteorite. I’ll be doing this through a work that I made in 2010.

The work is titled ‘Tuesday 1972’ and came from an interview that I held with a pilot. We discussed his experience of spatial disorientation on the human body. The term in aviation is where the pilot cannot differentiate between up and down and thus makes a fatal mistake of flying the plane in response to misguided senses. This is because the Vestibular system within the ear confuses the perception of balance in the body and overrides all other senses. Our bodies find it hard to ignore the sensation of being upside down. We are quicker to ignore the sight from our eyes, as it so often tricks us anyway. Our body then relies on the inner ear as a truth.

The work existed as a printed text on standard printing paper and was displayed on the ground (the horizon) and was shown with a rolled up sheet of aircraft grade aluminum. This work is very important for me as I became aware of the functional display of my work. Aesthetics rearticulated the work, something that was much more solid then previous reasons for selecting certain modes of display.

When I was researching the phenomena of spatial disorientation I came across the female Japanese pearl divers who used to dive off the coast of Darwin, Australia. Without diving tanks they would free dive to find the pearl producing Pinctada Maxima oyster. It was often in the murky waters of a moving current that they would find a similar disorientation experienced by the pilot years later over the jungles of Vietnam. This was a leading cause of drowning for these women, as without a reference point it is difficult to find the surface.

To break the viscous barrier of water without knowing the location makes that thin layer all the more impossible to penetrate.

To counteract the unfortunate situation of drowning they wore white cotton head-scarfs embroidered with a star atop their head. It was this discovery that made me realize the complicated relationship that a pearl and a meteorite had together.

Both are from two extremes, the lowest and the highest. If one was to loose orientation from either the bottom or the top, you could use the reference point to find yourself again within a center. The center is a safe and buoyant space, like seeing the sun when swimming in a lake with bad visibility.

To escape the confusion of the water head for the star, to escape the confusion above the clouds head for the pearl.

By taking these two elements and linking them together it creates a vertical theater. Characters can be introduced to speak their voice and also change the fundamental components through their presence. This was done by introducing lilies in the middle of the vertical theater. A flower that is historically connected to the gods, gods from both above and below. This choice also provided a logical step for display. When showing flowers they are best displayed on a plant or flower table, and this became the main form of the work.

Lilies also provided a point of departure to explore time within the work, as they bloom a few days after they are put in water.

Ultimately they are dependent on the amount of sunlight in the exhibition space, which determines when they will open.

To further complicate the relationship of these elements, different frequencies of time were introduced into the work. Different speeds were to occur at once within the work. This was done through the introduction of framed texts lent on a wall. The text articulated through letter format the role that the pearl and the meteorite had in the work as ambassadors of the two extremes. This text is integral as it also changed the time for the work to be processed. If one would choose to read it, they enter into a written flow, different to the flow of viewing objects. This flow, the same flow used to create the work, would thus determine the viewing of the work. With different paths for viewing the relationships of the objects, there should also be options for the multiplicities of time within these objects,

That is

The time taken to read the text The time taken to make the pearl The time taken for the meteorite’s discovery The time taken for the flowers to bloom

from

the time taken for the sunlight to reach this space.

and to

find

the pearl

.