Material Agency and Mutual Transformation: Found Objects as Materials for Making

Abstract

Taking as its point of departure the personal experience of finding a discarded rope on a remote beach, this essay describes the way found objects assert agency to become craft materials, and how, through the process of making, this changes both the found object and craftsperson. This mutual transformation is described here through three periods of interaction – finding, making, and the thematic development of an artwork – all varying lengths of time during which a found object influences a craftsperson’s actions, learning, ideas, and future making decisions. With reference to Michael David Kirchhoff’s concept of “agential condition,” in which objects are held to transform and mediate our understanding, and Jane Bennett’s theorizing on nonhuman entities acting as forces with their own tendencies, this essay proposes that an object’s ability to assert itself as a new craft material is influenced by a craftsperson’s heightened state of receptivity within the parameters of environment, available time, and a willingness to adapt a creative practice. Craftspeople often utilize and transform found objects in their work, but how they are changed by such materials isn’t always clear. Tracking an object’s assertion of agency throughout a multistep personal making process provides insight into such mutual influence and transformation.

Keywords:

• agency
• craft
• found objects
• making
• materials
• transformation
• marine debris

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here I use the noun “assemblage” to refer to the literal aggregate of multiple objects amassed and composed to create something new. This word connects to my relationship with the process of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling, which refers to the physical act of manipulating materials with the goal of making or producing artwork(s), but also to the assembling of ideas, concepts, and perceptions in order to generate work that emerges from the inner, private world’s reaction to and interaction with the outer world. The process is my way of making sense of an experience. Different, yet certainly relevant to the artwork discussed in the essay, is the art historical term “assemblage.” This genre, which gained momentum in the mid to late 1950’s, encompasses tactile, tangible two-dimensional and multi-component three-dimensional works. Assemblage utilizes a wide range of unconventional, sometimes found materials, and an additive processes (as opposed to subtractive ones, the removal of material to create a sculpture, for example). In the 1961 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Art of Assemblage, curator William C. Seitz recognized a new medium emerging from abstract expressionism and dada, citing its origins with Jean Dubuffet, who had distinguished assemblage from the form’s precursor, collage (created by pasting various items on a flat surface), beginning in 1953 with his assemblages d’empreintes and highly tactile work made from butterfly wings. See Diane Waldman, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), 244. For a key text on contemporary assemblage in Alaska, including artists’ motivations, challenges, ideas, and art-making methods, see Julie Michelle Decker, Found and Assembled in Alaska: A Catalogue to the Exhibition Organized by the Alaska State Museum, Juneau (Anchorage: Decker Art Services, 2001).

2 Political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett cites that our own hubris keeps us from “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.” To give voice to an inanimate object is an invitation for what Bennett suggests as much needed “attentiveness” to non-human things. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), ix.

3 In this article, Kirchhoff articulates a theoretical framework to apply to material culture studies when ascribing agency to objects. He proposes two conditions that must be met in order to advance such thinking: 1.) an ontological condition, whereby material entities exist alongside living beings, and 2.) an epistemological condition, whereby the relationship between people and things is transformational in terms of human understanding. By advancing this argument, Kirchhoff’s intention is to provide constructive guidance when assessing and/or applying the wide range of theories on material agency within the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. Michael David Kirchhoff, “Material Agency: A Theoretical Framework for Ascribing Agency to Material Culture,” Techné 13, no 3 (Fall 2009): 205.

4 Kirchhoff, “Material Agency”: 206.

5 While generally not part of my studio practice, artists in coastal areas around the world do create artwork from marine debris, often with a social, political, or environmental awareness as the agenda. For further writing by artists on the influence of marine plastics on their practices, see Julie Decker, Gyre: The Plastic Ocean (London: Booth-Clibborn, 2014).

6 Kirchhoff, “Material Agency,” 210.

7 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 9.

8 Ibid., viii.

9 Ibid., ix.

10 We regularly find objects printed with languages from all over the world.

11 Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 101.

12 Ibid., 101.

13 An example of this is the antimacassar, a crocheted or embroidered cloth made to protect upholstery fabric from dirt, body oil, or hair oil. The intention was for the antimacassar, no matter how intricately made, to be disposable and/or replaceable, whereas an expensive piece of furniture would have been kept for decades or even generations.

14 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Meissner

Alaska artist Amy Meissner combines handwork, found objects, and abandoned textiles to reference literal, physical, and emotional labor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in Critical Craft Studies, and teaches the Craft of Repair as an act of prolonging, care, and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition.