Collection Study
Rachel Kneebone, ‘Trilogy’ series, 2006–2007

Text by Yates Norton
April 2021

The trilogy of works in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection by artist Rachel Kneebone comprises three porcelain pieces with titles taken from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes and August Wilhelm Schlegel: Trilogy (1) Silence cannot do away with things language cannot state, Trilogy (2) waiting is an enchantment, Trilogy (3) In Praise of tears.¹ They are made of porcelain and show us a world of indeterminate creatures entangled with vegetal forms, all massed together and spilling over their bases, which are often cracked. There is no one point from which to view these works: we are compelled to move around and between them. Although each one is numbered, they do not form an ordered sequence with a beginning, middle and an end.

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (Taylor and Francis), 2013. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments. Translated by Richard Howe, (Hill and Wang, 1978), p.37. August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘In Praise of Tears.’ Written 1807, first published 1808. Translation copyright © by Emily Ezust, from the LiederNet Archive. https://www.lieder.net/. Last accessed, 6 April, 2021

Let us move into one of the cracks in the base.

The glaze has stopped abruptly at the edges. Inside is the matte white of unglazed porcelain. It looks like compacted sugar. It holds the threat of dust, like asbestos, or the enchantment of fine snow. There is another crack, this time the glaze has seeped over its edges making it appear like a moist orifice.

There are also the ‘crazes’, the fine cracks that appear just below the surface of the glaze. They are produced by tensile stresses that the glaze is not quite able to fully withstand. These crazes scatter the light, making us see into the depth of the glaze. At the same time the gleam on the glaze’s surface reflects light outward: we are at once pulled in and repelled out, and we see glaze as a substance that moves, fractures, resists and glaze as a surface that seduces us with its shine. ‘The seductive qualities of the material are important’, Kneebone writes, ‘involving the audience to engage with the work through looking, as an active requirement.’²

² Rachel Kneebone, artist statement in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection

Although we cannot touch the pieces, to perceive the textures, the way light is absorbed and thrown out, the weightiness of some parts, the unbearable fragility of others, is to be affected by this strange material. These works demand a self-conscious and active viewer who can engage with technique, skill and materiality, even if we do not know anything about porcelain. In a way, that is the point. The works ask us to ask questions of them in turn. We could call this way of looking ‘artisanal’ because it is rooted in an acknowledgment of material as something not just transformed, but transformable, not just touched but touchable. Even if we have no experience of working with porcelain, the full range of effects Kneebone creates shows this material as full of promise, capacity and difference. Eve Sedgwick has observed this seductive quality of texture. She writes:

To perceive texture is never only to ask or know What is it like? Nor even just How does it impinge on me? Textural perception always explores two other questions as well: How did it get that way? And What could I do with it? [...] Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.³

³ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Duke University Press, 2003), pp.13-14

Kneebone knows that matter responds to but does not passively submit to touch. In fact, we all know this intuitively, although this understanding has been obscured by ideologies that see human agency as primary and matter as passive. For instance, we need only remember trying to make something out of clay, as many of us undoubtedly did at school. Clay responds differently depending on the moisture and pressure of our touch. When we touch clay, we encounter restless resistance. We are moved by what we move. If we had a pot or figure in mind at the start of our project, what we end up with is likely to be pleasurably or frustratingly different from what we may have at first imagined. We do not simply apply form to a lump of inert matter. Matter responds and we respond in turn. This is what Karen Barad calls ‘intra-action’, a word she proposes in place of 'interaction', which implies that bodies are pre-established vessels of agency that then simply exercise this agency against or at another body.⁴ Intra-action, on the other hand, acknowledges how agency is not possessed by individuals as pre-packaged entities, as it were, but emerges over time through the ongoing configuring and recon-figuring of relations between bodies. Kneebone knows this because she works closely with materials. She notes, for instance, how porcelain 'has a level of resistance to work with [...] it is not passive or inert. Working with and against the boundaries of the materials is what forms the work.'⁵ The pieces in the Trilogy bear witness to this. They are like the passionate correspondences of two lovers, artist and material, each responding to the other with no desire for an end. This is why the crack in the socle with that slither of dry, unglazed porcelain is like a sly wink, in case we might think this piece is a mere object securely bound, not a precariously lively thing.

⁴ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Duke University Press, 2007)
⁵ Author’s email correspondence with the artist, March 2021

Kneebone writes: 'The making process has more authority to me than the desire to produce an object. The metamorphoses, the journey, the in-between state is key to underpinning my work. [...] Within the work there is an ambiguity whether the motifs are emerging or dissolving into the plinth/territory. I see this ambiguity as a suspension, or life.'⁶ And although the works are glazed and fired, the ambiguity, suspension and metamorphoses do not stop. The works depart again on another form of being in the world as they engage our senses. The experience of looking at and with them continually makes the works anew. It is impossible to see the myriad details in Kneebone’s works as isolated, static parts that can be catalogued and arranged in one narrative or idea. Rather, we see these parts as if they were different voices in a complex polyphonic score, each answering in counterpoint to the other.⁷ Some voices emerge or fade away, others come together in dissonance or a strange kind of harmony. We may try to get an overview of the rhythms and shapes of the pieces, but then tiny details, jerking rhythms, lead us back into the intricate structures and we are drawn along the works' shifting tempi, moving in and out, back and forth, never stopping, always moving. The ancient philosopher, Aristoxenus thought of rhythm in the way perhaps Kneebone conceives of it: that is, as a verb or action, forming endless reconfigurations of relations over time.⁸ The rhythmic way of seeing that the works engage us in is therefore also a form of making.

⁶ Rachel Kneebone, artist statement in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
⁷ Tim Ingold, ‘Making, Growing, Learning,’ Two lectures presented at UFMG, Belo Horizonte, October 2011, Educação em Revista, Belo Horizonte, vol. 29, no.03, p.316
⁸ See Eilon Morris, Rhythm in Acting and Performance: Embodied Approaches and Understandings, (Bloomsbury, 2017)

If life is this movement of always being made and unmade, then what is the suspension Kneebone refers to? Suspension is not the opposite of movement. To suspend is to draw out the tensile strength of a material, to poise between collapse and elevation. Suspension is the indeterminate state of intra-action, the ongoing correspondence of forces. It is in this sense, full of movement. In a way, all life is suspension, the constant winding and unwinding of threads, actions to which the word suspension is etymologically related. Trinh T. Minh-ha, drawing on Roland Barthes, has observed how suspension stops us from pinning down the world with categories and names. Suspension moves along the expansive and generous logic of 'both and' and the 'not yet.'⁹ The world then becomes a point of departure, not the end point of a final meaning, identity or name. This gives space for movement, which is to say, for life. Suspension is thus the ongoing promise of emergence. Suspension, like indeterminacy, is not the moment before something is actualised or produced. It is, to quote Lars Spuyboeck, 'the real overreaching itself through time', what he calls a 'superabundance and superactuality, an event that keeps going on, that carries on [...] the present of the present stretching itself deep into the future.'¹⁰ Suspension is therefore about keeping life going, in all its difference, and not trying to stop it.

⁹ Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, (Routledge, 1991), pp.214-15
¹⁰ Lars Spuyboeck, Grace and Gravity: Architectures of the Figure, (Bloomsbury, 2020). Accessed online at https://www.perlego.com/book/1978342

Gifts are often in this register of superabundance.¹¹ Gifts are also indeterminate. They are not like transactions. Like rhythm, they create forms of relations that have to be grappled with and negotiated over time. Not all gifts are given and received in the same way. The gift that is given by the Trilogy pieces is like the one that Minh-ha writes about: a gift given 'without obligation or debt involved and without expecting any form of return. Here, nothing is owed, for there is no donor who is not an acceptor. Who is giving whom? What is exactly given?'¹² The indeterminacy of this gift of abundance, the 'alternative registers of feeling through the change in the feel of the piece' that Kneebone sets up, is like the tactile sense Sedgwick feels in the textural thing.¹³ We are compelled to ask, what can we do with what we have been given? And in that moment of wonder and questioning we are moved to keep going, since 'the gift once circulated is always already a reciprocal gift. It is given as a link of a chain of transmission, as a setting into motion of a dormant force within us, the very force which allows threads to keep on unwinding, even in periods when dreams are said to dry up, adventures are scorned upon, and novelty has so declined as to lose its magic power.'¹⁴

¹¹ Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, (Cohen and West, 1966)
¹² Minh-ha, op.cit, p.23
¹³ Rachel Kneebone, artist statement in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
¹⁴ Ibid., pp.23-4

We are moved when we are given a gift. To be able to take a gift is to be receptive. It is also to be weakened and made vulnerable. Gifts are therefore full of responsibility. This is why Schlegel, whose poem In Praise of Tears (1808) offers the title of the third piece in the Trilogy, writes how the sensuality of the world given over to the poet as a gift renders us deeply, pleasurably, painfully opened-up. This gift of sensuality compels us to shed tears of longing to unite with the world and to let it into us:

Not with sweet
river water
did Prometheus form our clay.
No, with tears;
That is why in longing
and in pain we are at home.¹⁵

¹⁵ Schlegel, op.cit.

Creation is thus not the taking of resources and packing them together and being done with it. It is the unsealing of our bodies so that we leak and flow into the world and the world pours into us. When we do so, Schlegel writes of how our tears reflect a glimpse of the ineffable world of the heavens. But these heavens are not some transcendent matter-less realm (afterall, they rim our eyes in salty water); they appear to us when we convulse and weep.

When wet
eyes gleam
from the gentle dew of melancholy, then unsealed,
and therein mirrored,
is a glimpse of Heaven’s field.¹⁶

¹⁶ Ibid.

Wittgenstein, whose words are the basis of the title of the first piece in the Trilogy, was also a poet like Schlegel in this sense. He famously said, ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly; whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’.¹⁷ It would be innacurate to understand this as meaning a kind of depressed muteness. This is because Wittgenstein saw how we cannot respond to a world given to us so abundantly with the arrogance that ‘everything [can be] explained.¹⁸ Kneebone’s slight rewording, Silence cannot do away with things language cannot state, gets to the capacious sense of Wittgenstein’s words. Silence does not sweep away, but tries to gather up. It is a kind of silence that refuses to name and restrain the thing that bewilders and enchants us. To be silent is to not speak over or in place of what is given to us ('the word silence cancelling out the very thing it is describing; there should be no word/sound for silence’ as Kneebone has said); it is to be receptive to the indeterminacy of the gift being offered.¹⁹

¹⁷ Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, op.cit.
¹⁸ Ibid.
¹⁹ Author’s email correspondence with the artist. March 2021

What we sense when the world opens out to us and we open ourselves in turn is the haunting of always ‘more life’, as poet Ben Okri has said.²⁰ When we are opened out like this, we go ‘beyond significant language.’²¹ And beyond this significant language is what Wittgenstein calls ‘nonsense’, which is to say, a space with no one straight path or journey but countless, unnamea-ble possible combinations and possibilities to follow. Significant language cannot keep up as we move through this entangled world. And so, we can only be ‘silent’, where we understand silence as a kind of poetry, taken in the root sense of that word, as an act of making and crafting. This poetic sensibility, a state of attention, humility and wonder, allows the world to come ‘into high relief.’²² And reliefs, like Sedgwick’s account of touching and feeling, intone the possibility of impression, of carrying over their form into something else, like when we rub graphite across paper held against the texture of brick.

²⁰ Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free, (Phoenix House, 1996), p. 7
²¹ Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, (Wiley, 2014). Accessed online at perlego.com/book/999593
²² Uzma Z. Rizvi, ‘Decolonization as Care’, in Ana Paula Pais and Carolyn F. Strauss eds., Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, p.4

When we look at Kneebone’s Trilogy we are aware of this ‘more’ of possible translations and transformations. She notes how she tries to draw out ‘porcelain’s inherent potential for a diversity of mark, modelling and finish’ and in doing so create ‘alternative registers of feeling through the change in the feel of the piece.’²³ The Trilogy pieces are therefore full of ‘beginnings without ends, of initia-tions, of losses, of transformation and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts,’ to quote the writer Ursula K. Le Guin.²⁴ When we look at Kneebone’s works, we can’t tell one story or look at them in one way. There are no endpoints. Pathways are opened up, possibilities emerge, gifts are given and given over. Kneebone’s works refuse the patriarchal logic of the heroic story which has winners and losers, a beginning and an end. As Le Guin writes: ‘The Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces, the Lawgivers, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead).’²⁵ Instead of the Hero and his big spear and one-track story, Le Guin offers a ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’: storytelling as a gathering of bits and pieces, little details and seeds to plant that may effloresce in unexpected, aberrant ways. The purpose of gathering and telling these stories is, as Le Guin writes, ‘neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.’²⁶ That is to say, storytelling is life-giving and expansive. It is the ‘suspension, or life’ that Kneebone refers to. Looking at the Trilogy pieces, it is almost as if the ‘wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed’ in Le Guin’s carrier bag have been planted and are blossoming.

²³ Rachel Kneebone, artist statement in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
²⁴ Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, 1986. Available online theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin. Last accessed 6 April, 2021
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Ibid.

The Trilogy’s strange, shifting creatures, suspended in ‘in-between states’, demand that we look, as the artist reminds us, ‘as an active requirement.’²⁷ And we cannot so much look at these indeterminate, myriad forms, as look along with them as they appear to shift and change, slipping free from the grip of names and the THOK! of the Hero’s depressing death-giving spear. Kneebone’s assemblage holds what Susan Stryker calls a ‘monstrous potential’, refusing to finally ‘arrive’ at an identity, a name, a ‘true’ gender or the dichotomous vision of sex.²⁸ Kneebone presents an erotic assemblage where natural forms are shown in all their wayward, indeterminate potentiality. She reminds us that to really see, we must unlearn certain habits of looking and naming. When we do so, we can watch with wonder what Stacy Alaimo has called the ‘biological exuberance of nature’ in its hermaphrodictic, transitioning, intersex and interdependent lifeforms where ‘male and female functions don’t need to be packaged into lifelong distinct bodies.’²⁹ With so many buttocks intertwining with animal, vegetal and mineral forms in these pieces, perhaps we are reminded that sodomy was considered the ‘crime against nature’ because it had no reproductive potential. Kneebone offers a life against, beyond and after that nature of reproduction and regulated relations.

²⁷ Rachel Kneebone, artist statement in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
²⁸ Susan Stryker, ‘Foreword’, in Vakoch, D. (ed.) Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature. (Taylor and Francis, 2020.) Available online at: perlego.com/book/1583991
²⁹ Alaimo, ‘Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals’ (2010) cited in Vakoch, D. (ed.) Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature. (Taylor and Francis, 2020). Available at: perlego.com/book/1583991

Kneebone’s world is a wild one, where we can understand wildness, following Jack Halberstam, as a disordering of the ‘mania for classification’ that colonialism and the Enlightenment produced.³⁰ Although wildness can be ‘easily recognizable as part of a colonial epistemology within which colonizers cast nonmetropolitan spaces and people as savage, wild, and in need of cultivation’ and be taken as a ‘postliberal, postpolitical regime of anything goes’ it can also ‘take the anti-identitarian refusal embedded in queer theory and connect it to other sites of productive confusion, taxonomic lim-its, and boundary collapse.’³¹ Wildness can be, like Kneebone and Wittgenstein’s silence, a generative space of ‘alternative registers’ and ‘change in feeling’ which unsettle how we sense, see and relate. To be bewildered, a word that holds onto the wild, is to be struck by wonder and curiosity, and entails ‘the process of becoming wild by shedding knowledge (as opposed to becoming civilized by acquiring it).’³² Kneebone’s floral-vegetal-mineral beings bewilder us in this sense. We don’t get very far by trying to name and identify the parts, an activity that ends up feeling absurd if we try. ‘If you know the name of every plant, you recognise the plant and give its Latin name, but you don’t actually see the plant’, writes Tim Ingold. ‘The thing is being obscured by the veil of knowledge you have about it. So there is a certain virtue in being always able to see the world as if it were for the first time.’³³ In other words, to see the world with wonder and curiosity, as Kneebone compels us to do, is to see it in all its startling relief and to be impressed by it, as we so often are as children. When children shout out ‘Look!’ in the excitement of seeing and sensing something, it is not to try and kill it with a spear, but to share the wonder of the experience of seeing it.

³⁰ Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, (Duke University Press, 2020)
³¹ Ibid. pp.66, 25, 30
³² Ibid. p.31
³³Tim Ingold and Max Lamb, ‘“Materials are constantly astonishing”: In conversation with Max Lamb and Tim Ingold,’ in Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier eds., (Diaphanes, 2014) p.79

The bewildering displays of porcelain in Kneebone’s Trilogy create situations that refuse interpretative ease or the ‘endpoints’ of phenomenological resolution. We’ve seen how their technical complexity shows material as something alive and active. The dense, intricate visual field Kneebone creates also compels us to engage with the works in movement. Their rich textural surfaces appeal to our sense of touch, where touch piques us into the curiosity of asking questions and the desire to feel and see more, knowing that we can never completely know or understand the world. In this state of attention and receptivity, we suspend judgement and a language of categories, and so are opened up to a world that is always moving, abundantly always in the present. Kneebone offers us this dense world that can only be grappled with, never grasped and consumed. William Blake, a poet Kneebone has referenced in another work in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, She Led Me Through Her Garden Fair, Where All Her Golden Pleasures Grow (2006), once wrote that ‘the cistern contains, the fountain overflows.’34 The clinical cistern stills and treats water as something to manage and control. The fountain pours it forth in masses of shifting globules that can only momentarily be traced with our eyes as we follow them through the air before they disperse into a myriad of droplets. There is something fountain-like about the Trilogy works. Overwhelming and thrilling, they set in motion our eyes, bodies, senses and language.

Perhaps this is why it is so hard to write about them. They trouble our sense of language and order, and so they compel us to write with them, to travel along their contours and into their cracks. Difficulty and bewilderment are beginnings, not ends. And if we get up and move, we carry with us a gift.