Second Nature
Second Nature
Texts by Ralph Ghoche, “Second Nature” in “Run for Cover,” ed. Jennifer Sigler, special issue, Harvard Design Magazine 42 (Spring 2016).
Sumi ink and graphite pencil on washi, 35.5 x 26 cm
This pair of sumi-e paintings—shadow tracings—is done with the idea of a “second nature” and the features of something “ornamental” in mind. The experiment began in late January. I worked to make both pieces each a “photocopy” image of the other in poetic time: unique in ways subtle enough to be detected, yet not enough to be taken as disparate or divergent. Both were done at one take, rather by default than by design.
The words I handwrote are by Ralph Ghoche, Canadian historian of architecture and urbanism. They are chosen from his essay “Second Nature”:
“Ornament was a second nature, one that captured and focused the animate forces more potently than the living world itself.
Fear played a critical part in conceptions of ornament in the 19th century . . . By most accounts of the time, ornament first emerged as a response to a primitive terror of nature. It was a recoiling from the external world, a way to bring order to the dizzying chaos.”
Neither words nor image is ornamental here.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Paris, April 2020
