I’ve was debating on what to actually name this piece earlier, because hORALble didn’t seem like the ideal title. It just wasn’t working for me intuitively – it didn’t click. With further inspection, I’ve found that the humour lapsed the work and it would make it bathos. The humour in the title, Seeing Hertz worked for a previous sculpture.

The reason why it doesn’t work for the current sculpture is the sexual connotations, whereas the previous one is related to existential content. (Although I might be wrong).

Pavlov’s Lemon

I’ve decided to name it Pavlov’s Lemon in the end. The title intuitively sat better with me. I also think there’s some crossover between the psychosexual connotations, with simulacra and simulacrum. A pacifier (baby’s dummy) is supposedly seen as an unsatisfactory version of the real desire for the baby (the mother’s breast), but it’s actually conditioning, because the baby is after the mother’s milk. It’s just symbolised by the visual image of the breast. The baby finds a substitute by transference (the pacifier), and the rest is history.

Sensory Hierarchy and Sculpting

I remember one of my tutors, Dr. Lisa Watts (a performance artist) from my final year of BA Fine Art talking about a sensory hierarchy – sight and hearing at the top two, and touch was lower down.

I think it can be applied to sculpting a “trompe l’oeil” sculpture. Whenever I sculpt, I have a 3D object as a reference. Not 2nd generation information like an image from the internet. In the case of Seeing Hertz, I’ve used a plastic skull. This is because I feel the source instead of looking at it for the purposes of translating it to sculpture. I think muscle/bodily memory is more powerful in some ways than sight, because it’s more unconscious (perhaps it explains why it is lower down the hierarchy so it’s less conscious, or rather we’re less aware of it than sight).

The interpretations of any work is similar to song lyrics

As the creator of Pavlov’s Lemon, I’m more aware of where the idea of the lemon and pacifier originates from, (so it’s more amusing to me). But for the purposes of the viewers, the above explanation is considered true. I’ve found it’s really similar, if not the same, as song lyrics. The lyrics often is accepted by the public as a certain ‘this song is about this’, but there’s often debates online about ‘but the lyricist/song artist who has written this is about their personal life’, because it matches with their biography. I believe both are true, but it depends on where it’s being seen from.