8. Holles Street
The Inverse Proportion Rule
8
The Inverse Proportion Rule
Kensington Palace Gardens, 2006
The Hepworth stood on a pedestal at the centre of the room.
If it had not been for the broken threads nothing in the room would have looked amiss. It would generally be of little consequence if the only thing at fault with a room was a broken string. But this was one of those examples when the inverse proportion rule proved sacrosanct.
For only an ambassador’s room would be troubled by a snapped three millimetre circumference of twining. A string of this provenance though made it of far greater value, being specific to a particular locality of manufacture meant it was far from easy to replace.
The only thought that kept resurfacing was the problem I faced by the broken string. The two strands I had been given by the furniture workshop were hurriedly customised as a rough approximation of what was needed.
How this damage had happened was then relayed to me by the head housekeeper. A cat’s claw had plucked the string. Yes the friendly feline, beloved by the ambassador’s family, was the culprit. An innocent swipe if you will, a playful act had snapped this string completely. And the hope of a remedy, finding another string lying around to be a perfect match was not one I shared.
A quick online search while in the taxi had established that the strings employed by the artist herself were of a particular kind used by fisherman, specifically chosen and sourced to reflect the area where she lived and worked in St Ives. The two strings I had brought were of variable thickness and no use at all. I had a sense of someone peering over my shoulder.
I thought of that picture I found and imagined what Barbara Hepworth would be doing if she encountered a similar problem. The cat in the picture must have been enticed to explore her studio, did it ever take swipes at the sculptures too? The ambassador’s cat was no where to be seen.
I was alone except for the imagined presence of the woman, sitting silent, her legs crossed, a single lit cigarette balanced on a tray mysteriously glowing but with a smokeless tip watching my dilemma with an expression of mild amusement.
Once this image arrived, it began to reveal itself further, like the pages of an account I was compelled to read. She wore a plain set of blue overalls with breast pockets, she held a small notepad and was busily scribbling into it with a pencil, a series of gestures that I could tell belonged to a sketch.
She looked up at the sculpture with the cat swiped string with a mix of curious abandonment, pointing the pencil horizontally between thumb and forefinger, compelled to use it as a measuring tool, making calculations, before plunging her eyes back toward the note book and squaring whatever she had seen into further pencil markings. The pulse of her pencil carved itself onto the page of her notebook.
And in her actions I read in her face the perpetual belief that the making of art is just a form of self discovery, and that to express an idea is simply to provoke another.
How long can a concept be explored is therefore no different to asking oneself how long should that theoretical piece of string be. Except none of this was going to answer what I was meant to be doing in the here and now.
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