Everything is indexical - musing on piss flowers and dead foxes

 I feel like I'm getting really good at clickbait titles, but unlike most articles with clickbait titles, this one does relate directly to the things in the title. Of course, my brain is now rushing off thinking of clickbait titles "They pissed in the snow, this happened next!".... "They found lemon snow, they never expected this!" anyhooooo....

The DCS were chatting this morning about an upcoming exhibition featuring Helen Chadwick, and discussing her notorious "Piss Flowers". I'd vaguely heard of them, but Catherine shared a link to a Tate article about them. While I still find them a bit gross (as is the intention, I think), I was charmed by the broader meaning of love, sharing (both romantic and bodily), and transience. Indexical marks have been on my mind since the tutorial, and I was struck that the flowers are indexical.

A few months ago, I shared an entry that likened art to the 'fire' not the 'ashes' - wow, ok, over a year ago... And I was reflecting that, in a sense, I'm saying that all art is indexical - or at least, that I think of all my art as being 'indexical' in the broadest sense. The objects I make are not 'the art', they are the indexical marks from 'the art', which is the non-physical phenomena that they represent... 

Maybe... I think there is something interesting and useful in this idea, I can't quite wrap my head around what my head is trying to tell me!

All of which brought me back to my dead foxes. I learnt a lot making a two part mould to cast them, but never really got them to work, and sort of lost the will... But they sort of floated back to the top of the stew, and now I'm thinking about 3d scanning and 3d printing to make recordings of random 1m square chunks of interesting ground... And it struck me that maybe I should revisit my poor little foxes? Roadkill is very indexical - in the literal sense of smooshed blood and skin, tyre marks etc, but also in the more metaphorical sense of a nocturnal adventure undertake but never completed - the indexical 'mark' of what should have been, and wasn't. 

I love the word 'smooshed'.

The idea of 3d scanning the (perhaps-not-so-) recently departed remains of foxes makes me feel a bit yucky, but I think that's maybe even more reason to do it. It would be sharing death literally in face, but also recognising and memorialising what was life.

I don't have time to get to grips with 3d scanning and 3d printing in time, but I honestly think that perhaps the roadkill sculptures are what I 'should' have exhibited in my final show.