Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe (She/Her)
Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is a writer and sculptor based between County Clare, Ireland and Glasgow, UK.
Her practice is currently located at the point of contact between sculpture and writing, engaging with feminist new materialist concerns, exploring language as a liminal site through which to practice material attention and translate the sensorial and enmeshed encounters of body and matter. Her recent publications featured in; Map Magazine and Circa Art Magazine. Theo has recently been awarded Arts Council Ireland funding to further her postgraduate research and sculptural practice.
This body of work was created as part of her thesis project for her Art Writing Master of Letter 2023, as a publication alongside a material installation. The presence of place and time held within the body of the objects presented in the institutional site of Glasgow School of Art. A relic of presence, of distance, of closing distance through your body, and a dedication to the labour of memory across a variety of sculptural medium, and through the language of casting.
Contact
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[post_content] => With a tendency towards aftermatter is a publication and sculptural installation in which
material bodies move through processes of aging and changing posture, oxidizing,
crystalizing, slumping, holding.
Through auto-theoretical and fictional re-weavings of memories the work proposes a material attention to human and more-than-human matter, exploring attention to physical accumulations of time, and human tendency towards the generation of matter. We follow our protagonist as she casts the kitchen table in her family home, and carries it in pieces across the sea between County Clare, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland, in a suitcase, holding the presence of the site’s body and memories inside the casts and material residues. Through these practices of revisitation she considers her experience of learning sited in the language and materials of place.
These objects are material residues which come from the pages of the text, and hold space for the continuation of the narrative in sculptural form. The material states age, seep, and oxidise in response to changes to the environment. The objects dry out, loose water, slump, curl, their skin changes colour, and they settle into their site. All states of aftermatter which have been formed by, extracted from, or alter in contact with water.
Materials used:
Handmade paper (made with sand, soil, hair, dust all from Co. Clare, Ireland, and notes
from undergraduate and postgraduate studies), water, dust, hair, PVA, sand (from Co. Clare, Ireland), salt (extracted from the Atlantic Ocean in Co. Clare, Ireland), soil (from Co. Clare, Ireland), glass wax, microcrystalline wax, steel, iron powder and borax.
Audio recordings collected from The Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland.
When I was little we had a disappearing lake at the back of our house.
It would keep disappearing and being all at once long after we left, and well before we came.
The lake would breathe in and out, expanding and contracting like lungs.
And this is where time would build up like silt.
Coating the rocks.
Making paper out of time itself.
And I remember thinking that the lake can birth form all on its own.
This is where I learned that time was physical, was a measure and a body all of its own.
- Extract from With a tendency towards aftermatter
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[post_content] => With a tendency towards aftermatter is a publication and sculptural installation in which
material bodies move through processes of aging and changing posture, oxidizing,
crystalizing, slumping, holding.
Through auto-theoretical and fictional re-weavings of memories the work proposes a material attention to human and more-than-human matter, exploring attention to physical accumulations of time, and human tendency towards the generation of matter. We follow our protagonist as she casts the kitchen table in her family home, and carries it in pieces across the sea between County Clare, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland, in a suitcase, holding the presence of the site’s body and memories inside the casts and material residues. Through these practices of revisitation she considers her experience of learning sited in the language and materials of place.
Aftermatter, residual matter in the aftermath of an action.
This body of practice holds space for material encounters, for the exploration of memories and material attentions towards sites, matter, and labours of making. The work engages with the idea of aftermatter, residues of matter in the aftermath of action, matter which embodies and evidences the wake of its own action.
The written work focuses on materially aware memories and how these inform a process of learning and building a language to mediate the world. Through moments which explore attunement to physicalisations of time, and human tendencies towards the generation of matter, both the incidental and intentional, encountering a disappearing lake amidst other material state changes of matter.
The text explores acts of re-visitation and material exchange between site and body, documenting this pattern of closing and re-opening distance between new and old sites of home over the course of a year. This work is a proposition for the accumulation learning, osmotic processual learning, and becoming-with the material sites we live within. Reflecting on a personal learning experience which practiced and created an otherwise space of feminist more-than-human engagement with the material world. With my practice moving between writing, to casting, to papermaking, photographs, video, sculptural durational material work, utilizing all of these elements to create installations, exhibitions, publications, formed space, exploring these through an auto theoretical and material feminist lens .
The work ends with the protagonist realizing that this action of physicalizing the table in material memory the conversations, processes, travel and care exchanged between themselves and their family, themselves and the sites of home, that this process and story is the articulation of the endeavour of home education.
This process of casting a kitchen table and carrying it across the sea, is evidencing, documenting, and mapping in fiction and in material practice the narrative and specimen of home education, the role of home, of visiting, of the sites of home, the labour of family, and the labour of the body, the continuing labour and action, and the futile endeavours of holding memories. This body of work is a cast of the space of this experience, a cast of these moments of reliance, distance and presence cast and suspended in language and in material residues.
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[post_content] => Reading at Tongue & Groove: Art Writing Showcase event at Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
Featuring a reading of the final chapter of With a tendency towards aftermatter, accompanied by video work entitled Aftermatter Sundial.
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With a tendency towards aftermatter: Installation
With a tendency towards aftermatter is a publication and sculptural installation in which
material bodies move through processes of aging and changing posture, oxidizing,
crystalizing, slumping, holding.
Through auto-theoretical and fictional re-weavings of memories the work proposes a material attention to human and more-than-human matter, exploring attention to physical accumulations of time, and human tendency towards the generation of matter. We follow our protagonist as she casts the kitchen table in her family home, and carries it in pieces across the sea between County Clare, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland, in a suitcase, holding the presence of the site’s body and memories inside the casts and material residues. Through these practices of revisitation she considers her experience of learning sited in the language and materials of place.
These objects are material residues which come from the pages of the text, and hold space for the continuation of the narrative in sculptural form. The material states age, seep, and oxidise in response to changes to the environment. The objects dry out, loose water, slump, curl, their skin changes colour, and they settle into their site. All states of aftermatter which have been formed by, extracted from, or alter in contact with water.
Materials used:
Handmade paper (made with sand, soil, hair, dust all from Co. Clare, Ireland, and notes
from undergraduate and postgraduate studies), water, dust, hair, PVA, sand (from Co. Clare, Ireland), salt (extracted from the Atlantic Ocean in Co. Clare, Ireland), soil (from Co. Clare, Ireland), glass wax, microcrystalline wax, steel, iron powder and borax.
Audio recordings collected from The Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland.
When I was little we had a disappearing lake at the back of our house.
It would keep disappearing and being all at once long after we left, and well before we came.
The lake would breathe in and out, expanding and contracting like lungs.
And this is where time would build up like silt.
Coating the rocks.
Making paper out of time itself.
And I remember thinking that the lake can birth form all on its own.
This is where I learned that time was physical, was a measure and a body all of its own.
– Extract from With a tendency towards aftermatter
With a tendency towards aftermatter installation
With a tendency towards aftermatter installation
With a tendency towards aftermatter: Publication
With a tendency towards aftermatter is a publication and sculptural installation in which
material bodies move through processes of aging and changing posture, oxidizing,
crystalizing, slumping, holding.
Through auto-theoretical and fictional re-weavings of memories the work proposes a material attention to human and more-than-human matter, exploring attention to physical accumulations of time, and human tendency towards the generation of matter. We follow our protagonist as she casts the kitchen table in her family home, and carries it in pieces across the sea between County Clare, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland, in a suitcase, holding the presence of the site’s body and memories inside the casts and material residues. Through these practices of revisitation she considers her experience of learning sited in the language and materials of place.
Aftermatter, residual matter in the aftermath of an action.
This body of practice holds space for material encounters, for the exploration of memories and material attentions towards sites, matter, and labours of making. The work engages with the idea of aftermatter, residues of matter in the aftermath of action, matter which embodies and evidences the wake of its own action.
The written work focuses on materially aware memories and how these inform a process of learning and building a language to mediate the world. Through moments which explore attunement to physicalisations of time, and human tendencies towards the generation of matter, both the incidental and intentional, encountering a disappearing lake amidst other material state changes of matter.
The text explores acts of re-visitation and material exchange between site and body, documenting this pattern of closing and re-opening distance between new and old sites of home over the course of a year. This work is a proposition for the accumulation learning, osmotic processual learning, and becoming-with the material sites we live within. Reflecting on a personal learning experience which practiced and created an otherwise space of feminist more-than-human engagement with the material world. With my practice moving between writing, to casting, to papermaking, photographs, video, sculptural durational material work, utilizing all of these elements to create installations, exhibitions, publications, formed space, exploring these through an auto theoretical and material feminist lens .
The work ends with the protagonist realizing that this action of physicalizing the table in material memory the conversations, processes, travel and care exchanged between themselves and their family, themselves and the sites of home, that this process and story is the articulation of the endeavour of home education.
This process of casting a kitchen table and carrying it across the sea, is evidencing, documenting, and mapping in fiction and in material practice the narrative and specimen of home education, the role of home, of visiting, of the sites of home, the labour of family, and the labour of the body, the continuing labour and action, and the futile endeavours of holding memories. This body of work is a cast of the space of this experience, a cast of these moments of reliance, distance and presence cast and suspended in language and in material residues.
With a tendency towards aftermatter: Performance at Centre of Contemporary Art Glasgow
Reading at Tongue & Groove: Art Writing Showcase event at Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
Featuring a reading of the final chapter of With a tendency towards aftermatter, accompanied by video work entitled Aftermatter Sundial.
