Last week, at the invitation of my former supervisor Professor Marquard Smith, I presented my work on critical materialities to the Vilnius Academy of Arts doctoral candidates in Fine Art.

In deciding what to present, I took the opportunity to pull together my projects which sit within Slime Diaries and The Coral Notes, to work through how I am moving from one project to another, paying particular attention to their different registers and their areas of overlap and commonality.

I am conscious that my practice is on the move, as my focus and attention has moved from Slime to Coral in the last year. In attempting to articulate this movement, I drew on one of my favourite pieces of writing, Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

On revisiting the text, I became hyper-aware, in a way I had not been before, of the materiality, materials and objects Le Guin plays with as she works out what it meant for her to write fiction and what it meant for her to write science-fiction in particular.

In this text, Le Guin talks of exploring “how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were”. In this text, she talks to coming to write science-fiction novels lugging a “great heavy sack of stuff“, her “carrier bag“. She talks of carrying a mustard seed, woven nets, a blue pebble, a chronometer, and a mouse’s skull, noting that:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again–if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.

Ursula Le GUIN,
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1989

This concept fed my understanding of how my own practice is moving. As my daughters often comment — and as I do as well — my home is full of bags, baskets and containers. What I am doing, I realised, was perpetually bringing things home and throwing them into some thing. And with this realisation, I too understood how my practice was evolving, and why I was using project titles for my different practices, different activities, and the different objects and images I am making.

It is — maybe — about making sense of my material pre-occupations; it is — maybe — about capture and containment; it is — maybe — about trying to say something, of the now and the next; and it is definitely about trying to make a move towards understanding, in the chaos of it all.

As a result, I proposed to the doctoral fine art students a way towards a methodology I am calling A Basket Theory of Practice, a method of practice woven from the myriad of references, materials, displacements and situatedness, disciplines and fields which we — I and them — occupy. And something which can hold us, albeit temporarily, as we work our way through our materials to some place, some thing, new.

I am also conscious here, as I was last week when I constructed my presentation, of my work as a cultural semiotician, forever trying to open the bonnet of culture and look into the engine underneath, looking at its signs and symbols, and how these elements make meaning socially, culturally and politically.

And so I ended the session with some basket theory questions hovering around critical materialities and cultural semiotics, which maybe you too might want to think about:

• What are our material demands?
• What demands are our materials making on us?
• What is our cultural and social texture?
• How are we sensing and feeling our worlds?
• What might it be like to hold our world, as it is now, in our hands?
• What sensation would the world make on our fingertips, on our palms?
• What is the first taste on the tongue of our political realities?
• What is the lingering and lasting taste of our political realities?