The hand means action: it grasps, it creates, at times it would seem even to think. In repose, the hand is not a soulless tool lying on the table or hanging beside the body. Habit, instinct and the will to action are all stored in it, and long practice is needed to learn what gestures it is about to make.
Henri Focillon 1
Hands, potatoes, peanuts, turnips, frying pans, clouds are common things, ordinary. As such, hands, potatoes, peanuts, turnips, frying pans and clouds are little remarked on. Rarely, one with Henri Focillon's insight may take up hands, and make use of them as subject matter for an essay. Rarely, one with Sherry Owens' insight may take them up and use them in the facture of artworks. What is interesting in this is use is not so much what is used, though that is far from irrelevant, but to what use the thing is used in the artworks.
The representation of the thing-however compelling the verisimilitude of the representation-is not the thing itself. Indeed, the thing itself might be a part of the material cause of an artwork, but if it is, the thing itself as a component in an artwork is not ontologically nor semiologically the same as the thing itself antecedent to its being used as a component of an artwork. So also even if the thing itself qua material cause of the artwork is exhaustively coextensive with the thing itself antecedent to its use as the material cause of the artwork.
Burning out the invested organic material of a peanut or potato, replacing the molded wax of a hand with bronze, and the subsequent chasing and patination of the bronze, is not in itself exhaustive of what is entailed in the facture of the artwork. Rather, it is a part of the process of the facture of the artwork, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the artwork, constituting the material cause of the artwork. At most, in itself the mere casting of an existing object in bronze is making a simulacrum qua replica. Were it otherwise, the countless baby shoes cast in bronze would all be artworks, and not merely artifacts.
Owens' Drift wraps around the east and south walls of the gallery, denoting the planes of the walls as such, marking the space as an installation and defining the volume of the gallery. Arrayed as a stoichastic distribution, the small elements comprising Drift form a cloud, not as one might represent a cloud as a closed form, but rather as the random distribution of water vapor forms a cloud: ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione, "art imitates nature in its manner of operation." 2 To refer to the 109 components of Drift as 'small elements' evades the question of how and to what end the particularity of the components-peanuts cast in bronze-enters into one's regard of the work. So also the nineteen bronze new potatoes of Cluster: In both Drift and Cluster the specificity of the modular components could not be abstracted from the installation of the pieces without altering one's reception of the pieces. Do a thought experiment: suppose that the peanuts of Drift are irregular forms of the same scale as the peanuts, but which cannot be regarded as representing peanuts. If these forms replaced the peanuts, what changes? At first glance, nothing. There would be small forms stoichastically spotting the east and west walls of the gallery, serving to define the planes of the walls, the extent and array of the installation as such, and the volume of the gallery. But at second glance, everything changes when the peanuts of Drift are no longer peanuts, or the potatoes of Cluster are no longer potatoes. The specificity of peanuts or potatoes is integral to one's reception of the respective works. In this regard, Kant's position that aesthetic experience entails judgments without concepts fails. 3 The peanutness of peanuts and the potatoeness of potatoes is a necessary aspect of one's reception of Drift and Cluster, not only in the specificity of the respective intension of peanuts and potatoes, but in their extension and resonance. For the concept of peanut or potato subsumes the associations we bring to the concept peanut and potato: both peanuts and potatoes are foodstuffs, agricultural commodities, that grow underground, are inexpensive (unlike truffles, which also grow underground), are capable of storage for relative long periods for later consumption.
In Drift and Cluster, peanuts are not peanuts and potatoes are not potatoes: the two artworks are composed with bronze representations of peanuts and potatoes. As representations, the individual modules of the work as such elicit the concepts of peanuts and potatoes, but the artworks as such elicit the concept of clouds. The bronze peanuts and potatoes are metaphors for clouds. As such, the signification of the bronze peanuts and potatoes is at once of both peanuts and potatoes in all their specificity and concrete particularity, and what is most unpeanut and unpotatoe, in a system of oppositions operating in two stages. That is, the individual bronze representations of peanuts or potatoes serve in concert as the means of representations of clouds. In their employment as representations of clouds in installations, the bronze peanuts and potatoes assume, like their cloud referent, a different form with each time and place of appearing. Thus:
| thing | representation |
| peanut, potato | bronze peanut, potato |
| organic | metallic |
| perishable | permanent |
| bronze peanuts, potatos | clouds |
| relation of identity | relation of alterity |
| subterranean | sky |
| proximal | distal |
| immutable | mutable |
It is in these linkages of oppositions that the artness of the artwork subsists; the works physical facture is conceptually and logically equiprimordial even if, as the requisite means of perduring physical embodiedment of these conceptual linkages it is carried out subsequently.
Sherry Owens lives in Dallas, where she received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University in 1972. Recent exhibitions include: 2003: cloudsandislands, Redbud Gallery, Houston; Working With Wood, Valley House Gallery, Dallas; A Sense of Place, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas; Known and Unknown, Parchman Stremmel Gallery, San Antonio; 2002: Shifting Ground, ArtScan Gallery and Randolph Projects, Houston; Texas National 2002, Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches; Modalities of the Visible: A Survey of Contemporary Art in North Texas, Forum Gallery, Brookhaven College; Celebracion, Buddy Holly Center, Lubbock; Steel Girrrls, Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Loosely Landscape, Parchman Stremmel Galleries, San Antonio. Her work is in the collections of American Airlines, Austin, First United Methodist Church, Dallas, Harbourton Enterprises, New York, New York, JPI, Dallas, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Neiman Marcus, Dallas and Honolulu, State Foundation of Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, Texas Sculpture Garden, Frisco, Texas, Ambassador Kathryn Hall, Vienna, Austria, and numerous private collections.