File Note 98: Salvatore Arancio

The mythographer Marina Warner has written compellingly about what she calls ‘the monstrous imagination’. This is reason’s dark side, a way of thinking (or perhaps dreaming) that ‘revels in excess and assemblage’. Monsters are, Warner suggests, embodiments of our lack of understanding, a way to delineate the borders of what we don’t really know. After all, sea serpents only populated the parts of nautical maps where no ship had yet dared to sail.

Salvatore Arancio is an artist whose work has often depicted those dark places — volcanoes, caves, faraway oceans — where the biomorphic and science-fictional collide. Place, for Arancio, is most often composite, as with his ongoing photo-etchings of assembled landscapes. Pictures taken from geological primers are tweaked and sutured together; Stromboli comes to be conjoined with Fingal’s Cave. Wanting to retain some continuity between form and content, the Sicilian-born artist occasionally reinserts these doctored landscapes into books, as with his publication Wonders of the Volcano. Captions stay the same though, the hope being that what he has called ‘a strange temporality’ will emerge, where you’re not exactly sure where you might be, or when.

For his 2014–15 Ceramics Residency at Camden Arts Centre, Arancio wanted to think about the relationship with the grotesque in nature. What he had in mind was, specifically, thinking about the gardens in Bomarzo, Italy’s mid-16th-century Sacro Bosco (Sacred Wood), or the Park of Monsters, a proto baroque riot of ornamental oddities, dark delights and grottoes posing as the Gates to Hell. (Salvador Dalí was, inevitably, an admirer.) So Arancio set about making a garden in miniature, rendered in clay. Rather than do this alone, the project was to be devel-oped in concert, working in the ceramics studio alongside students from the Slade and a group who attended regular lessons. Something attracted Arancio to this way of working. It felt democratic. Authorship would be ambiguous, and no distinction would be made between background, age or ability. Both groups were set the same brief: look around you, consider nature in its strangest and most startling forms. 

When we met in the ceramics studio, on one of the final days of his residency, Arancio told me how he had borrowed an idea from a 2005 performance work by Richard Slee. First presented at the World Ceramics Biennale in Korea, the piece’s title, Big Nose, was an allusion to the Korean nickname for Westerners. Slee lay on his back with his face covered by a bulbous mask-like slab of clay. Arancio liked how the piece recalled the strange miens of Goya’s witches, while chiming with the excessiveness of Archimboldo’s protuberant portraits, in which fruit and vegetables cluster into faces. For a week, Arancio’s and the two groups’ green-glazed ceramic forms were grouped on the floor of a low-lit gallery space, like growths poking through the soil. A subtle soundtrack was built from recordings of the crackling of glazes cooling, which you sometimes hear when you open the kiln door after a firing. It’s a sound that Arancio calls ‘beauti-ful but also violent’. 

In the midst of this assemblage of ceramics, there were several performances, happenings in this temporary garden. Performers would lie face-up on the ground, with their heads resting under one of several grotto like vessels. Lying prone, faces covered, they seemed to be asleep, dreaming, or maybe even tripping. And, as goes the title from Goya’s famous etching, the sleep of reason produces monsters. Here, as elsewhere in Arancio’s work, nature is a kind of theatre for ritual, a willing collaborator with altered states, a way of thinking monstrously.