"Amfortas": Art, Music and Mythology

This blog entry is written to accompany my Oxfordshire Artweeks 2023 exhibition, which features my artwork “Amfortas”:

“Amfortas” - copyright Mark Clay 2023

“Amfortas” originated as a broken splinter of railway sleeper which I retrieved (in September 2021) from the currently disused Amlwch railway line on Anglesey. It was the theme of my Masters degree in Fine Art, and has fascinated me for many years.

I picked up this small fragment (about 70cm long) and brought it home on instinct. I am something of a magpie when it comes to collecting materials from places that interest me. (Don’t look in my shed.) I knew I wanted to do something with it but I did not know what, at first. I was interested in the idea of portraying the materiality of the railway for those who neither knew nor visited it. Found materials from the line itself seemed the best way to achieve that. When I got home from Anglesey, I left it sitting on the window sill to dry out, uncertain what I should do with it. And there it stayed until May 2022.

Close by, a reel of bright red cotton thread had spent a similar period of time waiting for me to use it. I had been pondering using thread as a means of introducing colour to my work for a while - and indeed had already used thread in some of my previous pieces. Quite what the exact timing and impetus was for combining these two materials I can no longer recall. Sometimes things just emerge from a period of patience and reflection. You can’t force ideas - like smacking the bottom of a ketchup bottle. But it is probable that it was at least in part due to my listening to one of my favourite operas, “Parsifal” by Richard Wagner.

The place where I found my sleeper fragment, not far from Llanerchymedd, Anglesey. Copyright Mark Clay 2021.

I was particularly interested in the little notch or hole in the sleeper fragment (see above) which is what had attracted me to this particular piece of sleeper. When the idea came to bind the area around the hole with red thread to make it resemble a wound, I knew that my idea had finally crystallised after those long months.

“Parsifal”, which I have blogged about previously as a source of inspiration in its own right (albeit still to emerge after several years!), features the character Amfortas. He suffers from a wound that never heals. With that, it seemed to me that I could make a meaningful connection between the outwardly dissimilar railway line and the operatic character: the railway line, too, could be said to be “wounded” beyond repair. And I realise only as I write this blog that there is even a pleasing semi-similarity in the names: Amlwch and Amfortas.

Wagner’s operas draw heavily on mythology in their texts and underlying ideas (Gods, knights, magic powers, love potions, etc.). The reasons for this are as huge and complex as the operas themselves, but it seems to me that part of the reason for this is to use the power of mythology to elevate the ideas and the music to something more timeless and eternal, and thereby to increase their power and impact. Without in any way wishing to put my art on the level of Wagner’s, it did seem to me that there was a similar potential in taking this sad fragment of a decaying railway and transforming it into a piece of art that carries ideas to people through exhibition and discussion, far beyond its genesis and location.

“Parsifal” is a great hymn to pity, compassion and redemption. At its close, Amfortas is in fact redeemed, and his wound is healed. Perhaps there is hope for a similar redemption and healing for the Amlwch railway line too, as the volunteers of Lein Amlwch strive to repair it to allow trains to run again. Let’s hope so.

Thoughts On Binding

The following is a documentation of some of the thinking and reflection that occurred during a new phase of making, as I continue to build a body of work on the theme of the (disused) Amlwch railway line, on Anglesey. It centres on my use of copper thread as a binding material.

What is binding about?

I think of acts of care, preservation (e.g. Egyptian mummification), of recording and remembrance. A way to “re-member”, as in to put something back together again. At the same time, I think of natural binding: of bindweed and ivy that slowly entwines the Amlwch railway line in a slow, relentless act of reclamation and transformation.

So there is tension here, between:

1. The binding of care and preservation, the human intention to create, to preserve and to restore, to bring dead things back to life, and;

2. The binding of capture, control, the natural intention to change, replace, evolve.  New life growing out of the death of the old.

Is it even possible to reconcile the two in a piece of work, to place them alongside each other as I think is happening on the railway? As Tim Ingold might say, perhaps the making will show me how, might show me how to think by making….

So I take a piece of old sleeper slice and turn it in my hands, The cut edges are ostensibly smooth but I can feel the lines in the surface, both radial and circumferential. There are cracks in the body and at the edges of the wood, some from the time of the growing, and some from the time of the dying (rotting). I continue to turn the wood block over and over and a way of making comes to me from this.

Taking up fine copper thread, I combine it with the process of turning over and over. I follow the edges and contours of the piece of wood until I have bound it, but not obscured it. It seems to me, as I work, that the act of binding expresses a desire to protect and to support this old wood. To stop it coming apart. To “re-member” it:

The process flows on and so my ideas flow on with it. I keep going, taking this further and do something similar for all the remaining fragments from this “end of the sleeper” slice. The copper thread seems also to imply a spirit of reconnection, or restoration, of the wood, to the point before time, decay, and my intervention split it apart.

This end piece of wood brings me in mind of my idea of a piece called “Terminus”. The end. I had previously imagined doing it with a much larger piece of old rotted sleeper, but the coronavirus lockdown prevents me searching for one on the Amlwch railway line itself.

I am not done with this. This idea keeps me, and perhaps by extension this decaying railway, in the present tense. I take up another sleeper slice. What if I worked more closely with the grain and the lines of the wood? Is this a way, even, to bind those two halves of my thoughts on binding together. (Pun absolutely intended.)

It changes the way I do the binding. Not a relatively random reflex as in the previous pieces, but a more considered, exploratory, mindful approach. I too am progressively bound up by the idea and the process. The thread encloses the wood and it encloses me. too, in this repetitive act of making and thinking.

One hour later:

It feels like a mapping (back to my starting point – the OS map of Anglesey), an exploration, a re-discovery even, of the nature of these materials. Not an exact one, but a halting, partial, cautious and even risky one (the thread breaks several times as it catches and stretches). As I wind around the edges, notches and grooves the tightened thread makes tiny, metallic “plink” sounds like the plucking of a harp string at the top of its range.  (I must record these.)

There. There it is. The idea of the “sounding of the line.”

I am so aware, by now, of the reflective and thoughtful nature of what I am now doing. It is slower, and more careful, too.  Perhaps even ritualistic: as in Ancient Egypt, with the mummification of dead pharaohs and their belongings, the act of binding (mummification) is an act of remembering and preserving things that are precious.

I think this railway is precious. And my acts of binding have enabled me to make that tangible.