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Clay Stealing Clay : Ghost Particle Pithos

coloured pencil and graphite on hand-drawn grid paper

2022

For the project Leaning Out of Windows, organized by Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig at Emily Carr University, gathering artists with physicists in collaborative speculative research.

I am interested in the potentialities and limitations of translation, and how the words used in physics might relate to, or conflate, meaning-making. As reflected in its title, this work combines three mythologies and their challenging inferences: an anecdote concerning Lazarus (who, after he was resurrected, never laughed again, except when he saw a man stealing a clay pot and said: “ha! clay stealing clay.”); the elusive neutrinos and their exquisite observatories (a.k.a. ghost particles, captured by grids of photomultiplier tubes in gigantic underground water-filled chambers), and Pandora’s pithos (ancient clay alimentary storage vessels, also used ritually to hold bodies for burial). In the tangle of knowledge I gleaned in this process… on matter, light and optics, on cherenkov radiation detectors, on trilayer graphene and kinetic energy, on the slowness of drawing vs speed of computer imaging… is an interwoven awareness of tools as artifacts of human entanglement with material.

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