The Deep Zoo

The World in a Seed: The Art of Anne Hirondelle

Several years ago the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with one million hand-painted porcelain replicas of sunflower seeds. The experience of Ai Wei Wei’s installation was one of deeply felt joy and mindfulness.

The seed is emblematic not only of potency, but of the initial impulse that engenders a universe, a universe characterized by mutability and so: multiplicity. If a seed appears to be finite, its greatest mystery is its capacity to produce an infinite number of replicas that — unlike Ai Wei Wei’s porcelain seeds — are self-transforming. It is easy to forget that the Real’s myriad and shifting forms began with a single impulse and in a single instant, and that everything evolves (and devolves), including the creative imagination. Which brings me to a recent experience of the mutable and the marvelous, when I stepped into a sunlit room and saw Anne Hirondelle’s recent ceramic sculptures, which, if not replicas of a seed, brought a seed to mind — the one the ancients of India called bja. Bja is a seed syllable (the familiar Om is another) said to contain and, when spoken, precipitate the primal spark. In other words, it is both the container and the vehicle of causality. It is the potential event from which everything arises.

To give breath to the seed syllable by saying it aloud is an act of reverence, an acknowledgment of the sacred. And it evokes the material world, causing “all this” (idam sarvam) to incandesce within the mind. (For the Japanese Buddhists who embraced the idea of the bja — they called it shuji — the writing that embodies “all this” is beautiful and timeless, and it is spontaneous; it is irregular. In other words: it evolves.)

Entering into Anne Hirondelle’s studio I thought, she has made seed syllables! She has made bja! She calls them: Re: Volves. High-fired, made of stoneware, and painted rather than glazed, these seeds of hers are also planets. In stillness and in silence, they are poised to spin into orbit. They bring to mind the cogs of some sort of celestial machine. Perhaps the wheel of the Zodiac as Roberto Calasso describes it, “girding the world obliquely like a sash, like a many colored sash.” And, perhaps, they are the mirror of “the mind’s back and forth, its inconstancy.”¹

Or. . the inner lives of the planets and their influence on the space in which they spin, this action reduced to a formula that is palpable as well as visible. Or maybe. . (you see how these objects seed the mind!) the letters of an alphabet in three dimensions, but implying at least four, embodying perfection, beautiful and timeless, but also spontaneous and irregular — which is exactly how the Japanese Buddhist describes the bja You see: the Re: Volves refuse immobility, and instead gyre and gimble in the mind’s wabe. (At one point she considered calling them Gyres.)

The Re: Volves have themselves evolved from an entire galaxy of mutations in clay as well as pencil on tracing paper, beginning with the Turnpool, the Outurn, a series called Go; her Abouturns, then Tumble, Remember (and there is a theory that the memory is as essential to our universe as is gravity), Re: Form, Extrapolation. Her Re: Coils appear to be under tension, ceaselessly spooling and unspooling, never static but always transforming, like those springs said to be vibrating at the deepest heart of everything, smaller than anything we can imagine, let alone measure. .

Perhaps this is what this work is telling us: if we could somehow see with our naked eyes at the smallest distance scales, we would know that “all this” is beautiful, always in flux, mindful, and oscillating.