Lee Hassall
More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour
On reflection I found myself writing in both tenses, when it came to reflecting on Lee Hassall’s work ‘More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour’. The vividness and the absorption of his piece, meant that even a day or so after seeing the work most of the writing up seems to take shape in present tense, reflecting a subjective duration and an element of reliving the event as though still present. This is a testament to how immersive the work is/was.
Lee Hassall starts by describing the death of his Father, holding a light unbleached paper book. He describes his Father’s skin like thin wax paper, and embracing his Father and feeling skin and bone, using the words ‘he folded in on himself’. Tears surface and continue to stream down my face. This emotive response was unavoidable – and that was felt throughout the auditorium in the silence.
Baptiste sat initially in the front row with a camcorder. Stands up recording Hassall. Hassall puts on a black apron. And sits on a sculptor’s stool. On the large white table is a small stack of light tanned paper. An unusual earthy sculpture. A leather sac the sort instruments and sculpting tools can be found in, and a plastic heavy-duty bag, type of bag clay resides in. A metal bucket on the floor. Hassall opens the plastic bag and took a piece of clay out. As he flattens and folds the bag, clay dust exhales. The presence of his Father’s death seems to hold remanence in each subsequent action.
As he softens the clay in his hands, going back and forth to the bucket of water, making a tiny bowl. Pouring water in and out of the small vessel, keeping its malleable vitality. Baptiste with his camcorder slowly moves around Hassall in a non-choreographed dance. I imagine this is how he works in anthropology, responsive to his human subjects while they’re deep in activity. As he moves around the sculptor, the moving breathing subject of his fascination it also brought us in. The very close proximity seemed odd at first. I had a suspicion that the camera must be discreet in order not to meet a performative demand of the lens, here the relationship did something completely unexpected, the camera did not seem to intervene with the sculptor’s flow/magic. The once strange action and presence of Baptiste became normal, we too were examining a man. With time the actions became ours.
A beeper goes off, a timer on his watch. Functions as a reminder to a mechanical sense of time, it places us back to our own position, separate to his. Slicing time. Showcasing a paradoxical relationship, how our collective body lost sense of time. We were pulled back from an immersive absorption of time into reality, so to speak. Like a puncture in a tire.
Hassall washes his hands and takes the small paper book, picking a page and starts to read a description of a woman alone in a desolate field, despite its appearance she has a sense of disruption that exceeds its appearance.
The puncture in time, pulled us to the desolate fields in Dorothy’s Wordsworth description. Here we became the woman knowing that underneath the earth lies a core memory. A reminder of sorts that time is not linear. That despite our surroundings the body functions on its own premise. Maybe, this land that won’t yield anything isn’t entirely fruitless.
Hassall returns to the pot adding water using a brush he stirs inside the small pot, creating a slip. He washes his hands intermittently intercepting time with material. He applies the clay to his face with the brush, the strokes appear attentive. The image of this desolate land juxtaposes Hassall; who is in the process of creation and bringing things into existence, sculpting life into a landscape that otherwise would be barren. He presses the light brown waxy paper on top of his clay face, pressing the paper, it forms a tight seal. Peeling back time, the impression leaves a print. I think of his Father as sharing the same flesh, possibly even some facial features of the sculptor. And the exhale of the clay, earlier in the work as not entirely an exhale but rather breathing life into life.
A beeping sound erupts, placing us back into a viewer rather than a witness or the artist ourselves.
Hassall removes himself from the table and washes his hands. And reads from his book. He describes the sculpture on the table, as between things; a taurus, amongst other things, it appeared earthy like a root, parts appeared clay like, like soft flesh, a small creature exhibiting a small horn, as though the other one like a teething child had not grown in yet, the bound creature one arm breaking out of a weaved material. It had a long piece of straw like grass, interwoven, loosely holding it together. This holding together reminds me of the different interconnecting woven elements brought into motion with each evolving movement and varied dialogue, the intricacy of skin.
The clay man returns to the small bowl, and mixes some more slip thickening the clay, the application to the face seems a little heavier this time, it shows a physical layering of time. When the paper was peeled back the impression more sculptural in terms of body, the internal coming to the surface.
An atmosphere built from disruption and silence, a back-and-forth tension, felt similar to when the sky opens up after days of sun.
The timer goes off, he washes his hands. Picks up the books, searches the pages. Hassall reveals a dream where his father is the voice of a cashpoint, an ATM. The voice speaks to his son, “All representation is a restriction of freedom.” This dream seems to speak of the connection capitalism has with the image. That perhaps underneath a picturesque landscape is hidden depth, it’s a skilled craft to make something beautiful – yet in this act, simultaneously, the depth is masked, sold on its aesthetic, representational appreciation.
Locating the socket with the charcoal bar, between Clay, Man and Father, Hassall draws eyes, figuring his eyes from the mask that lay tightly as a second skin on his face. His fingers dig deep between the eye socket and paper, paper resisting, it finally tears, piercing, two eyes peer out. He rips a mouth hole.
He picks up the earthy being, holding it up in a one arm cradle, bringing into focus the small baby, two hands crossed keeping the baby towards his chest, but toward the viewer wrapped in a blanket. Holding it out. A proud Father showing us his child. Only at this point is there a direct invitation for him and the child to be seen. It’s a strange and beautiful encounter, hopeful.
Places the baby down. He peels back the paper. And washes the clay from his face. Each clay print, same face differing in appearance, suggests that even the same actions produce various appearances.
Reflection
Hassall’s live work demonstrates how a loved one’s absence is always accompanied by their presence. They co-exist within us. And are not an image simply lost in time. Gestures, material pull memory into new life, never a complete repeat, neither indifferent. Living, doing, being can bring life to moments seemingly displaced in time, rather than replaying or reliving a moment in it’s entirety, as if sheer preservation is redeemable, his live work offers something anew. Re-play, the hyphen is more of an inference, that nothing is ever completely lost.
‘Nothing disappears completely, however nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories or relics.’
-Lefebvre, The production of space, 1974 (pg.229)
The symposium expanded the premise of ‘Replay’ and individual works seem to resonate with a Lefebvre quote all in unique ways and individualistic ways.
What subsists cannot be soley defined:
Memories
Memories allude to past events. Hassall’s work showed that memories do not reside in the past and can through actions be pulled into new life.
Traces : Skin on skin
disrupts the relic/ the desolate landscape
Through the clay, Hassall reveals to us the potential of the land and the presence of some thing beyond its boundaries of the desolates land’s appearance. Hassall challenges the idea of fixed meaning, the kind that the woman seemed to be surrounded by. The clay and paper a poetic gesture to his father, beautiful, sincere and moving disrupts the desolate landscape.
The symbolism of clay, with its biblical and healing connotations, is disrupted. The work creates new dimensions. Rather than an incarnation, we glimpse an ancestral lineage—a connection to memories and experiences that shape this man’s autonomy. An incarnation would suggest that the man was a blank canvas, the work defies this notion.
The young one aka the child
The anthropomorphic creature takes various atemporal presences throughout the live work.
A ritualistic object, a root mummified both alive and simultaneously dead, a taurus creature that had just been born, sac still apparent and appearing like a film/skin, a newborn child.
An embodiment of the child showed in the last half of the work, where the child was held up by a proud father. We became witnesses of this joyous moment as he came into a full waiting room.
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Hassall’s live work starts with his father passing, each subsequent action remanences, suggesting that death is a part of life rather than a linear means to an end. The living, moving body that encompasses death while being alive seemed to contradict modernity’s concepts of time, linearity, dichotomy of life and death—in particular, the belief that life is a beginning. His work makes us question whether there are definitive binary breaks in time. And pulls into existence a space between rebirth and new potential.
The death of his father bought across such potent questions regarding postmodernity and modernity, because if a person has lost a loved one. It feels as though there is a puncture in time, a definitive break in time, to see, touch their human presence again is an impossibility, so there is a distinct line in the sand yet like genres and various ideas the loved one’s presence is still with us, and takes on various forms.
On the surface, there is a mechanical time. Perhaps a method for arranging the body. Rather than espousing a stance between postmodernity and modernity his work seemed to hold both paradoxes in terms of linear time and non-linear time. The beeping timer punctured the deeper levels and brought us to the surface, reminding us that we were at an event that determines time, we were brought in and out of these two contradictory positions, his work eloquently examining both. Usually, an alarm or beeping is a reminder to repeat a certain action/task, here it was an invitation for a free form trajectory, each time was a new intercepting narrative or insight that continued to weave an unpredictable narrative and created an individualistic notion to meanings. This challenged the presupposed function of the alarm and created new associations for the viewer, the watch no longer ascribed to its formal modernity usage, yet it still functions within the premise of time. A destabilised signifier of sorts.
The black space of the theatre did not command the art to appear a certain way, such as taking the form of a play. It presented a chasm akin to the woman’s surroundings in Dorothy Wordworth’s notes. And the light brought focus to a man deep in discovery and creation. To clarify my use of ‘chasm’ I mean it as landscape as an abyss or gorge and as a sudden interruption of continuity; a gap.
Reverse ekphrasis
Hassall’s reverse ekphrasis disrupts the typical ekphrasis by progressively interweaving fragments of a complex experience. Instead of summarising a piece of art’s exterior, ‘ekphrasis,’ it begins with the creative process (which began long before this moment in time), in fact, the work ruptures the idea of a singular moment or image, revealing hidden layers, highlighting its own live relevance as well as the fresh opportunities and potentials that arise when an action with several entry points is undertaken. The several entry points appeared as vignettes, different autobiographical experiences such as the death of his Father, a dream, Dorothy Wordworth’s notes. The notes although aren’t his, the interpretation is. The subsequent response, what I would call “periphery response”, where the influence is seemingly fragmented, therefore the response itself has gone through a deep analytical cycle, deeply digested, the responses can seem relatively removed from the initial influence yet is not devoid. The traditional ekphrasis is similar to a dense prefix or a synopsis, which makes little to no sense before a work is made and often confines the viewer and artist to predefined meanings, but Hassall’s approach breaks free from those constraints as discussed with the newer interpretations of clay, wax light brown paper, and binary conventions. This dive-in method revealed new and idiosyncratic material associations through process (Haseman, 2006).
Dislocating the silent image of ‘a woman in a field that won’t yield anything’ (Hassall, 2024), it is only in this space does she become aware of her own body differing to the landscape. The horror would be being lost to the still.
