SM407 Bitten Eve

SM407

Bitten Eve

Images: Bitten Eve, 2005.

Crystallised sugar, height 300mm.

The beginning of an idea.

I was thinking about the opposites of ‘perfection’ and ‘non perfection’, and the word ‘slippage’ as it appeared in the theory I had been reading. It is a word that frequently crops up in the texts of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and others, but is also a tanning term. In this context ‘fur slip’ or slippage is what happens to a cured a hide, complete with fur, when it is imperfectly treated. If you stroke the fur, the poorly cured areas will slip out of the hide beneath your fingers, and that which you regarded as a beautiful artefact suddenly reveals itself to be a dead and still-rotting animal. One's first experience of this can be quite horrific. Slippage becomes a loaded word.

These associations produced the metaphorical image of ‘Bitten Eve’; a conceptual and visual ‘slippage’. The bite has slipped from the apple to the biter.

The Eve that came to mind is a limestone carving by the sculptor Gislebertus from about 1150 A.D. in the Cathedral of Autun in France. She is one half of a door lintel, removed from the cathedral during renovations and re-used as secular building material. The other half, Adam, is lost without trace, but Eve now resides in the Rolin Museum across the road from the Cathedral. Carved in deep relief, Romanesque in style, Eve lies horizontally, head propped on one hand, innocently gazing left, whilst her other hand reaches for the apple behind her. She seems almost to take the apple surreptitiously, as though distancing herself from the deed.

Some of the associations that came to mind along with the slippage:-

Perfection; origins; the Catholic Catechism learnt rote by children - 'Who made me?' 'God made me.' A feminist understanding of the moral blame heaped on Eve, and continuously carried by women; impurity; corruption: externalising and disowning the misdeed, as the pointing of blame extends from God, through Adam, to Eve, the apple, the Serpent and the Devil; relocating the blame back to the source; the non-ideal within the ideal; the impossibility of perfection, or perhaps the impossibility of imperfection.

The metaphor of Bitten Eve I found very pleasing; but the likely method of its fulfilment less so. The idea suggested that perfect Eve must be created from some traditional and value laden material such as marble, with the imperfection inserted into it. But perfection is impossible and traditional monolithic materials were unsuitable.

Then I remembered a little poem that my grandmother taught me;

What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice and all things nice

That's what little girls are made of

Sugar mice were pink or white, with string tales, and very hard to bite. A suitable material for Bitten Eve perhaps.

I subsequently modelled several clay sketches, and a final plug from which to create a small mould. I used Polygel brush-on synthetic rubber, backed up with a 2 part plaster mother-mould. I found a recipe for sugar mice on the Internet, and three books on sugar pulling and blowing from the catering sections of the library. I varied the ingredients and temperatures to develop a mixture and method that could be consistently used to produce a fine-grained, translucent, robust material in fairly large casts.

There are numerous practical variables to be controlled in sugar casting. The degree of crystallisation can vary from none at all to a coarse brown finish depending on the ingredients, volume, speed of heating, peak temperatures, or purity of the sugar. There are practical issues concerning the slip casting of large quantities of near-boiling syrup, which is heavy, messy and somewhat dangerous. Using plaster for the mother-mould is a heavy alternative, but necessary if it is to be pre-warmed. The sugar temperature is critical whilst pouring if premature crystallization is to be prevented. A second coat is difficult as the first is likely to collapse on contact with further hot wet sugar. As far as I am aware, no one casts sugar in anything more complex than flat sheets. It is clearly an unsuitable material, and I have frequently wondered if I am wasting my time. But looking at those pictures of pulled sugar, you know that indeed, pigs can fly.

The result of these and many other complicating factors meant that my first successful cast of Eve ended up on the floor, with both the sugar cast and the plaster mother-mould smashed into countless pieces (not to mention the dent in the polished floor-boards). The mother-mould has since been successfully repaired, and a second cast is complete, if not unblemished.

There is much more that I could discuss regarding the material, mould design, sculptural use of shadows required for sugar etc., but the more fundamental issues are of greater importance. Although I was satisfied with the concept of Bitten Eve and the use of sugar as a material, there is something overly intellectual about the project, and insufficiently visceral, that I was not able to resolve. The exploration and development of techniques and materials was fascinating and creative, but the emphasis was wrong. Ultimately – why bother? One has to be totally committed to something to consider devoting your life to it, and my ‘productionist’ and perhaps moralistic attitudes failed to find sufficient meaning in this work. On the other hand, the process of experimentation with the sugar was yet a further example of what I do in my work and life – push things just a bit too far, to the point of almost falling over; stack things up until they become so impossibly complex and finely balanced that something is about to fall. A tame version of extreme sports perhaps.

The other aspect was that despite the appealing translucency and impermanence of the sugar, and my pleasure in appropriating the forms of Gislebertus, ultimately these forms did not ‘do it’ for me. The enclosed, complete figure was too solid. The hollowness that I insisted upon, despite the added difficulties, seemed like an addition to the design and was not integrally part of it. The form would have looked just the same if it were solid because it had in fact evolved from solid Romanesque stone sculpture. The evocative figure of Eve was too caught up in well established meanings which made me complicit with them, despite my slippage intentions.

So sadly, the sugar experiments ended here, and Bitten Eve sits on a shelf in a downstairs room where the damp causes her slowly to decay, her beautiful form gradually slumping as though she has elephantiasis, and the smooth translucence of youth crystallizes to a chalky white surface blotched with discolourings of bacteria and mould.

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