Mneme and Rubik’s Years

By

Nicola Anthony

Mneme

I work a lot with words and statements, secrets and admissions that I collect from visitors to my exhibitions and website. These I tend to use as inspiration for my work, or more often as the material from which it is (physically) made. By this I mean that I use the words and sentences to structure the work, I start applying them as marks and drawing with them as lines.  

What I am concerned about is those little things – the moments, happenings and memories that shape us or define us. I feel that it’s not always the big things that are so defining, its these little moments that sometimes we don’t even notice, they touch us and shape us like raindrops on boulders, or years of waves lapping at the cliffs. So my work is about the imprint of these moments on who we are. The moments that define us. 

From this concept I built up a body of drawings using only one drawing tool – an inked date-stamp. I created ‘Mneme’, (the Greek muse of memory). She is the product of her own personal history – the lives and the people that have imprinted upon it. 

Rubik’s Years

Through a dialogue between fellow Fabelist Abigail Box and myself, we explored ideas of organizing chaos, cyclical time, the idea of distraction, the intangibility of time, marking time, and moments needing to become tangible or visual to us. 

Discussing schedules led to thinking about the philosophical nature of time and how one experiences it, also how on a micro scale the moments and individuals in time get left behind in a chaotic swathe of moments rushing onwards. Do we make an imprint? 

I was searching for the perfect metaphor to illustrate the apparently haphazardness of life and the chaotic form it sometimes takes, but with some sense of overall order or direction being there if you stand back or re-order – and I found it in the Rubik’s Cube. 

Further research told me that in a standard 3x3x3 puzzle, there are 239,500,800 ways to arrange the edges, and forty-three quintillion positions. (Which is such a big number it cant be comprehended. To give some perspective, if we gathered together as many 57-millimeter Rubik’s Cubes as there are permutations, they could cover the Earth’s surface 275 times.) Something so neat and simple can cause such an immense amount of variations. I like this as a metaphor for the decisions and choices in life and the impact these then have on it’s direction. 

Rubik’s Years is a sculpture about a chaotic life or a chaotic mind, it shows the apparent disorder of time becoming ordered and disordered again. The ebb and flow. The individual fragments of time blending into one. It also plays with the ideas of being able to see things in hindsight and the fluctuations between how we feel from one day to the next. The sculpture itself, by it’s very nature, is not meant to ‘clearly’ illustrate this, and is both puzzling and clear at the same time. I think it also alludes to madness, or at least the type of madness that we are all afflicted with on some level. 

To read the dialogue between Abigail Box and myself which lead to the making of this piece: http://www.thefabelist.com/improvisingimprintsnicolaanthonyandabigailbox/