Claire Haik

Project Statement for Glacial Friction

Glacial Friction is a body of paintings of the rocky terrain in the Catskill Mountains. The series directly reflects—in both concept and material—the physical structure of minerals found in nature. The color of the rocks, their density, and the way they crumble are all visible expressions of their invisible atomic structure. Pulverized into textural pigment, the rocks become the truest part of the painting.

The past and present of the mountains (everything from Pangaean sediment to Anthropocene pollution) and a sample of the bacteria from the streambed have all worked their way into the ecosystem and so are present within the paint. These paintings are both objects and images. They are both specimens and poetic visions. If analyzed in a laboratory, these works would reveal more about the scene being depicted than my visual compositions alone could ever provide. In this way, I leave space for an acknowledgement of the objective reality of nature alongside my propensity for aesthetic expression.

Making paint is more than a philosophical construct; it is an active labor-intensive experience. I begin by collecting rocks from the site I want to paint, searching to achieve the broadest range of color. After wrapping the rock in a thick piece of canvas cloth to collect pigment dust, I crush it with a hammer. Then on a tile surface I use a palette knife to gradually fold small portions of oil into the collected pigment to make a thick paste.

There are limitations to using hand-crushed natural pigments from rocks that are not normally used for paint. Searching for the appropriate pigments is a process of trial and error. Although a nearly limitless continuum of reds, yellows, greys, and browns can be found, I am often limited by the quantity of each. The color, hardness, and particle size also vary considerably. Most importantly, the paint I make is not a homogenous mixture and its changing physicality limits the use of the traditional paintbrush to only the application of transparent glazes. For opaque sections I use a palette knife to place the pigment. The physicality of my process allows me to experience and engage with the physical structure of the minerals I am depicting.

Project Statement: Pangaea Machine 

While I accelerate the decay of rock into sediment in my Glacial Friction paintings, I attempt to reverse the process in my sculpture Pangaea, which is a machine designed to slowly convert soil from all seven continents into sedimentary rock over a period of 340 million years. Pangaea consists of three pieces: a compression mechanism (loaded with sediment), an electric counter, and a wrench.

I sourced soil, sand, and rocks from locations throughout the world. Layering these within a clear cylinder to visually emulate marble, I create stratification to be visually pleasing as well as culturally and personally symbolic.

The cylinder is suspended within a giant clamp spanning from the ceiling to the floor. Made from industrial gas pipes, this device is bolted to the ceiling with oversized flanges. The pipes widen to enclose the cylindrical sediment container, and the top pipe is threaded so that the pressure can be increased over time. Engraved in the pipe are the words, “KEEP UNDER PRESSURE,” and, “TURN EVERY 500 YEARS.” This call to action is accompanied by a solitary wrench and a clock found on the wall behind the sculpture. The wrench is dormant—waiting to be used. The clock is imprinted with the words, “TIME REMAINING: 340,000,000 YEARS,” and beneath it are the words, “SEDIMENT INCLUDED: AFRICA, ANTARCTICA, ASIA, AUSTRALIA, EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA, AND SOUTH AMERICA.” Pangaea is designed to include a range of conceptual constructs.

Pangaea is a machine, designed to turn rock into stone. The design is simple drawing straight lines from ceiling to floor that point to the sky and to the foundations below. The building will not hold. The ocean will slowly rise. The bedrock will shift away. The continents will slide together and stitch themselves into new supercontinent, a new Pangaea, long before the clock on my humble facsimile runs out.

Pangaea is a thought experiment, a distortion and a stepping out of time. It asks the viewers to contemplate themselves in relation to geologic time; something that is very difficult as John McPhee explains: “The human condition and its relationship to human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.”  This concept of immensity as something knowable but not comprehensible is a predominant motivator for my work. I want to entice others to contemplate the idea of deep time, guiding them to discover the conceptual complexity of time through narrative cues and incremental scaling-zooming out. Alluding to immediate individual action, the wrench situates the viewer within the present. Next, the engraving on the compression mechanism indicates that the machine must be tightened every five hundred years. Spanning twenty generations, a few hundred years is difficult but still possible to imagine, prodding us to wonder how many times one can mentally jump forward in increments of five hundred years before time becomes incomprehensible. Finally the clock counts down from the completely inconceivable time scale of hundreds of millions of years, a number so large it is almost without meaning. 

Pangaea is a social experiment, implying the question, “Who will turn the crank?” Will anybody turn it and what would motivate him or her? Looking at this sculpture, we are asked to reflect on both practical and metaphoric ideas. Can we feel empathy for the inanimate? What motivates collaborative multi-generational endeavors; could we be collectively motivated by a non-religious poetic moment? What value, symbolic or real, is embodied in making a tiny piece of stone barely large enough to hold in two hands. For me, these questions underscore the power of human empathy for the inanimate, our inclination to be a part of a symbolic collective experience, and desire to acknowledge and lovingly embrace the futility of our human condition. 

Pangaea is a gift to replace what I have taken. I have been taking rocks from places that are personally important and crushing them to make paintings and sculptures. My art practice has never been more environmentally friendly. The paints I make use no solvents, have no toxic elements, were not processed in factories or using chemicals, and were not industrially mined. Moreover, I would have great difficulty crushing enough rocks to even have a minimal impact on the site. However, because I am so close to the medium--sourcing it directly instead of buying a product--I have become very aware of the impact of my actions. Recognizing that the rocks I used to make my Glacial Friction and Earthen Palette paintings had such potent histories, I began to feel a sense of loss. Pangaea is a response to that loss and an attempt to poetically mitigate my impact. Despite the futility inherent in this gesture, Pangaea allows me to bring my work and philosophy from Glacial Friction and Earthen Palette full circle.

Project Statement for Natural Mechanics

A small sinkhole in a field is the result of a network of underground caves. The apparent chaos of a tangle of brush is actually highly ordered growth determined by the plants’ genetic code. An orange colored vine must be a parasite because plants need to absorb the red wavelengths of light to photosynthesize. Informed by scientific propensities, my abstractions of natural imagery show the hidden processes that exist beneath the visual exterior. Technology and science feed our understanding of these underlying mechanisms and change our relationship to the natural world.

As our understanding of reality changes so do our depictions of the world. This body of work explores the similarities between scientific and artistic representation. At the root, both choose certain variables while excluding others. The selected variables and the symbols used to represent them completely alter the meaning of the investigation. This series of paintings examines the inherent distortions created in all representations and their abstractions.

Displaced Dodder shows a parasitic plant— the Golden Dodder— floating in space, isolated from its host and the surrounding ecosystem, showing both the uses and limitations of controlled laboratory examination and the incomplete vision of reality it provides. In the companion piece, Deleted Dodder, the environment around the parasitic plant is shown but the plant itself is absent.  In its place is a highly abstracted system of symbols and colors to show a conceptual map of the plants expenditure of energy as it grows and searches for its host. Finally, Beneath the Sinkhole allows us to peer down into the crust of our planet showing geological processes that can literally drop the ground out from underneath our feet.

Throughout time, people have gazed out into approaching storms or across vast deserts and realized their own fragility and unimportance—a feeling of awe and wonder that many philosophers associated with the sublime. Today, science allows us look below the visible surface of the world into the complex system of endless consumption and redistribution that includes every atom, star, and living thing.  We cannot help but catch our breath in awe of the universe that utterly dwarfs imagination and eludes metaphorical representation.