september 8th, 2020
The TUBE ring is the first object I created.
I modelled the wax to obtain a ring that was the simplest unit of the full-empty conjunction. The ambivalence of matter: full-empty, dense-rarefied, tangible-intangible, visible-invisible.
“First love is never forgotten.” TUBE is an endless love because it speaks about my project which is not just processing of materials and shapes, but an expression of polarity.
All this is alchemical power.
The alchemists were the finest connoisseurs of matter seeing in it the connection of everything with the origin of its opposite. The most powerful manifestation of alchemical work was symbols (sym-ballein: to unite).
Jung wrote in the ‘Mysterium coniunctionis’: “In general, the alchemists strove for a total union of opposites in symbolic form (…). Hence they sought to find ways and means to produce that substance in which all opposites were united. It had to be material as well as spiritual, living as well as inert, masculine as well as feminine, old as well as young, and—presumably—morally neutral.” The Philosopher’s Stone was for alchemists a coniunctio between Spirit (philosopher’s) and Matter (stone).
TUBE is material substance containing and bearing its ultimate principle: emptiness and non-existence. In fact emptiness is what all material substance tends to, being a process and not a mere object.
MICRO-ARTICOLI IN FIBRA | pillole in fibra di logos | #4 – Manuela Gandini