Held in my Eyes
~ Corrie Jackson
Left at Etruria traces material into narrative; from the physical, mutable medium of dyes and pigments, natural and chemical, into a medium that transcends its material to become a means of storytelling. From the physical world into the world of the mind.
Etruria is an ancient region of Italy, home to the Etruscans. But, in the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood, the famous English potter, gave the name to his pottery factory and to the village he built around it. It was the height of the neoclassical movement, and though many of the Etruscan vases he admired and referenced turned out in fact to be Greek, Wedgwood's Etruria became its own utopian ideal of fair wages and communal living, perhaps as much a mythology as the images on the vases themselves.
Goodchild's work examines this space of venturing: how pigment and colour, the most base of materials, used in the earliest forms of art-making, pass through the artist's hand and labour to become work that lets us see beyond the material and into the narratives of human interaction - and into our own individual searches for Etruria, a place where we might find our ideals made manifest. Or, in the mythologies of the Etruscans and the utopian visions of Wedgwood, she poses a question: how do material, labour, and industrialization intersect with myth, touch, and creation?
The alchemy of Heather Goodchild's practice is defined not by singularity of medium but by multiplicities of exploration: her own labour of creation. From material and dyes derived from plants into the manufactured world of synthetics and constructed landscapes. She makes a space where the natural world can meet us where we are, and pull us back toward a renaissance of something lost - reminding us not to forget what nature does. Her work holds us again, urging us towards awareness.
The transmutation of material takes time. In looking, and in experiencing, we are slowly entwined back into the physical, woven into the fabric of the material world. We live in a moment when to be in our bodies can feel at odds with being in our minds - yet Goodchild pulls us gently, work by work, stitch by stitch, back into our senses, and into our relation to the world around us.
In Natural/Synthetic (Dye), the intersection of threads is made manifest. Natural wool holds dyed threads; the warp's colour is derived from natural dyes, such as cochineal (an insect), madder (a root) and indigo (leaves). The weft wool holds synthetic, acid based dyes. These imperceptibly twinned materials play with processes that are divided and yet, adjacent. Their histories entwine - one leading into another- touch and labour added and removed by industrialized processes and capital production. How do we value the invisible? Can we value what we know, but don't see? We must. Most of the most precious labour is invisible.
In his text, Bright Earth, Philip Ball notes the intersection of pigment and the synthetic - that the life of colour has shaped artists across centuries, and that most of the world's major chemical companies began as makers of synthetic dyes. [Ball, Bright Earth, 12-13.) The synthesis of labour in relation to the translation of colour; at what point does production become industrial? At what point is touch lost? Is it iterative or complete? This tension of the natural and the synthetic sits within Goodchild's landscapes: lush gardens, skies, and forms held in contrast to, and also within, our reality of manufactured landscapes.
Are we being pulled away from touch? Our constructed realm, and at times our Euturia, is the digital. On your phone - even the most advanced iPhone - you are seeing only about 53.6% of the visible colour, CMYK printing narrows the spectrum; the screen narrows it further still. And the majority of North Americans spend less than 7% of their waking hours outside. We are held within our own constructs - and Goodchild reminds us what we are missing.
Ancient Greek colour theory did not correspond to colours directly, but to light and dark: blue was darkness with a little light added; red, light and dark in equal measure. Only in the seventeenth century did modern colour theory arise, and the primary colours became established. And yet so much knowledge of colour and pigment has since eroded. As natural dyeing techniques fade from memory, ancestral, physical knowledge is lost - pressed out by the synthetic, the commercial, the convenient, and perhaps, the accessible.
In a society where building capacity and maximizing potential feel central to every conversation, where do we account for the gap between the world we have made for ourselves and what the world actually offers?
There is a transmutation in the dyeing process - an elevation through labour, an alchemy of changing the states of materials, pigment and thread, for our purpose and our pleasure. Goodchild leaves us here; left at Etruria -immersed in what has been left behind; in the fantasy of mythology and former work modes - while also turning left and moving forward to the world to come.
She gives us a reminder of our world, our senses, and all that they are still capable of.
