The Life of Holes

As an artist, I am struck by the ambiguous context of holed artifacts: their ‘thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds’. I often wonder just what these holes are, and did they exist prior to their own creation? Through literature and philosophy I discovered a method of communicating with the materiality of holes, thus connecting with aspects of their agency. This was the kind of co-authorship. Coauthoring is the affordance of an additional degree of freedom for the hole to engage in practice. For example, when I am sewing, the hole acts as a third hand which is felt through my own. Co-authored outcomes are determined by polytonal interactions of these two authors. Coauthorship brought to my practice an understanding of the liveness of holes, not as anthropomorphic objects but as ‘a certain gathering together of the threads of life’. The definitions in this glossary are an outcome of our conversation, ‘a sort of synthetic glossary of some essential conclusions’ whose truth is not determined solely by virtue of the meanings of the words used but also by a recourse to our experience of artistic practice. Often, these definitions are supported by the reuse of ideas ‘torn from their area, in order to reterritorialise another notion’. However, ‘[t]heir application and status, even their form and content, may change; yet they retain something essential through the process’. Individual definitions are non-determinate and indeterminate. They reveal themselves as affective rather than effective. This glossary, which is by no means comprehensive, is offered as a basis of a language with which to unpack the complexity of holes; the glossary responds to the capacity of holes to be expressive.

There is an ambiguous context for the holes in lace: the lace shapes its holes, which in turn shape the lace; its ‘thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds’ (Heidegger 1971). Lace is a fabric that is defined by its pattern of holes, a fabric in which most of its area is made of holes and yet these holes form no part of its traditional classification system. What are these holes? Do they pre-exist the lace’s making? Do they possess a life that is encapsulated within the lacemaking process? This paper is an attempt to understand these holes in lace, not by defining them as objects or entities but rather through a sensibility; through an emotional and aesthetic appreciation of their affects, exploring the hole for what it has to say about itself. As Susan Sontag would have said, the paper snares a sensibility of a hole in words. The paper takes its style and form from Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964), a text on capturing the sensibility of the ineffable. Recorded as jottings rather than an essay, the paper has non-linear and non-consecutive arguments presented as a series of numbered notes each of which capture a single context for a sensibility: its plain-text codifies the authors practice-based nomadic writings that unfolded through the process of experimental lacemaking whilst the hole and the author co-made a series of lace artefacts, and the italic-text is Sontag’s own.

This article presents a play-script as a research artefact whose dialogue inquires into the holes found in Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Epidauros II (1961) through the author’s practice of chemical-lace making; two makers who consider holes in very different media. This dialogue continues with the development of a taxonomy, not of a universe of holes but rather of the microcosm of an individual hole. This taxonomy counterpoints the different objects of discourse which take form as four viewpoints: 1st Person - the hole’s maker; 2nd Person - the hole’s user; 3rd Person - the hole’s viewer; and, 4th Person - the ontological hole.

The paper outlines the development of an aesthetic taxonomy-of-holes in devoré-lace [burnout-lace] through an intimate conversation between the practice of devoré-making and an appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas as articulated in 'A Thousand Plateaus' (1980). It presents a brief aesthetic history of devoré which reveals its use in haute couture being predominantly based upon devoré-velvet. The paper then presents a taxonomy-of-holes referencing holes not as absences but rather a complex haptic and optical heterogeneity in a homogeneous textile surface. This taxonomy supports a vision of a fuller potential for devoré-lace as a fashion design fabric. It argues the case for a more considered understanding of the fabric so that it may find a utility outside its visual cliché predicated upon its alluring and translucent qualities.