SORCE Collective

I recently sat down with ComCult Master’s student Griffen Horsley, talking about how he comes to knowledge through the processes of Research-Creation. This series explores the practices of SORCE members, asking them about how they come to hold knowledge. In this conversation, iowyth hezel ulthiin speaks with Griffen Horsley on his thesis which explores processes of image-making with items inherited after his grandmother’s passing.

iowyth: Please start by telling us a bit about your images.

Griffen Horsley: Everyone who does Research-Creation knows about this weird, winding process that you take to get there; a strange series of things happened. The actual images that I make are made with the artifacts or mementos that I’ve collected from my grandmother in the wake of her passing.

At the very start of Covid, right as I graduated from my undergrad and was starting to set my sights on leaving my hometown, my grandmother passed away. It was a huge shock and in the weeks that followed, as my family had to start doing the work to clear out her house and prepare for the funeral and all of the other stressful traumatic work that follows loss, it came with this sort of sentimentality and a grim convenience of “okay, well you’re moving. We’re getting her house ready to sell; we can give some of this stuff to you to help you furnish your apartment.” 

Three years out now, it’s a weird feeling that now I have her lamps and other stuff. What a weight off of my panicked chest and then of course, there was so much involved in rapidly trying to get a house sold that she had lived in for 40-plus years. There are these claims, “Oh well, we don’t need this. This is just decoration. People’s memories live on in us. We don’t need these objects.” But, in my head, I felt like I had to take all this stuff, preserving things that I knew the rest of my family were not necessarily able to focus on because they had much much bigger fish to fry.

I have since shepherded all of these objects, folding them into my everyday life. It’s a strange feeling to have all of these things. My lamps are always sort of the example I use because they were such an invisible part of my grandmother’s living room. They had been there forever. Now, I can’t turn a light in my apartment without thinking about her. These are strangely sentimental and it is a weird position to be in, to be living amongst these things, in my grandmother’s living room. It’s bizarre. I’m sure anyone who’s ever had to deal with coming into possession of things that you know are sentimental in some way. There’s this fear of using this thing every day. Now, what if I break it? That would be horrible!

So I started taking these awkward photos of me holding the little pots and mugs she had, taking pictures of them. I thought they were the least compelling images you’ve ever seen but if I ever shattered one of those cups, I wanted to be able to show someone, it was just this, even with a lame image that is not compelling.

So I was thinking and thinking and by this point, I had moved to Toronto and was getting ready to join ComCult and began thinking about my thesis. I had different ideas about what I’d be writing about. At first it was stuff about museum policy and decolonization, which is really important stuff to think about, but I found that all I could think about were these questions of why I want so badly to preserve these objects. What is it that’s making me feel so compelled? And then, what effect does this have on me? How is this changing my relationship with her to live amongst all of this stuff? It wasn’t until I was rooting around in my closet that I found my grandmother’s printer, and I thought “Oh, I’m joining a master’s program. A printer is helpful. I should have that plugged in.” It was sitting on my floor and I had this movie moment where I was looking at an object in my hand, looking at the printer, looking at the object, and then going, “There’s a scanner on that thing. I can roll these objects across the plate of the scanner and get the whole wraparound image.” Then, it’s not just some awkward photo of me holding my kettle. It’s not these photos where you can see my foot at the edge. So I thought, “Oh, perfect! This is an excellent way to document something.”

If you’ve ever like tried to scan something that’s not a flat sheet of paper, you know that it’s not a great way of documenting it. In the very first image I made, I rolled the pot across my scanner and it made this chilling image on a murky grey background with swirling textures. The blue decoration on the pot had turned black because of the interaction with the contact image sensor bar.

(I’ve learned a lot about scanner terminology lately!) 

The way that the actual sensor bar interacted with the reflective properties of the ceramic, made it incredibly difficult to pick up the colours. It becomes very washed out and strange. As soon as I saw that image pop up on my phone it was one of those moments that Natalie Loveless writes about a lot. It’s that spark of curiosity and drive that tells you “This is something. This is something strange.” This is maybe the best way to capture that strange feeling I have when I turn on my lamps or make myself a tea in a mug that I only used when with my grandma. It’s a strange feeling to want to preserve things, to want to represent them, toying with the fact that it’s often impossible to accurately represent anything, whatever accurate might mean. It’s impossible to perfectly do that.

So when it comes to Research-Creation, I have been taking Master’s courses talking about it as well as arts-based thinking and it all fell together, out of this strange desire to preserve my grandma’s stuff, and to talk about how weird it is to live amongst these objects, as I go about my every day. So it came out of that.

iowyth: That is truly fascinating. It is almost like receiving an archive and asking yourself, what do I do with this? How do I process this? How do I file these?

Griffen Horsley: Totally. There is something to that. Of course, I also don’t know the proper provenance of these things. I got these lamps that probably meant very little to her. They simply work and that’s also something. When I took anthropology at Lakehead University, we talked a lot about material culture and the sociality of objects. We talked about the ways that objects can represent and advocate for their own use case. So again, the door wants you to open it. It’s easy, especially with a door that has a a clear handle. It’s intuitive.

I had this background knowledge on materiality that was always at the edges of the stuff I was doing but it wasn’t until I actually received these objects with their murky histories and strange feelings attached to them that these ideas about like intuitive use cases became representations of my own relationships. Then my supervisor pointed me to thing theory. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s one of those esoteric lines of thought and so she actually didn’t want to tell me about it. She was worried it would derail my thesis. Thankfully, it didn’t and has actually helped me, but at the time, she rolled her eyes, and said, “I’m gonna have to tell you about thing theory.” It’s like material culture, but they also talk about how objects not only communicate their functions, but they often communicate their own kind of agency.

The strangeness I was feeling coming out of these objects seems to me, and seemed to me to be coming from their own agency. They’re speaking to me about their relationship with my grandmother and again, she’s gone. Typically the way that we talk about death in the Western world is a relationship that’s in your memory. But these objects changed their own trajectory. These lamps are not just lamps anymore. They’re items that connect me with my relationship to her and then beyond that, they’re now links in a chain, being added to as they turn into my objects as well. That’s the scary part. I think with any archive, it can become scary as these objects accrue new history, as they build up new memories that get associated with them. These things have now become mine. I sometimes feel as though I am overwriting their history with my own and am trying to negotiate that in my own brain. It’s hard to accept that something representating a memory is going to have its own life and make its own history. This is why it’s also strange to get rid of objects after someone passes away, because some random person will have their belongings, or else they wind up in a dump. This is why, sometimes people like myself, have the compulsion that says, “you better keep that vacuum” which is sometimes a hubristic impulse. I don’t need to keep the vacuum. Sometimes it’s not relevant to keep that particular thing, but the feeling remains. That’s what I’m trying to shine a spotlight on. That feeling exists, and that feeling is part of an interaction, an inter-relationality that these objects have of their own accord. 

iowyth: I was raised on the brave little toaster as a child. So, I’m on board with all this. I am the audience for this kind of work.

Griffen Horsley: That’s it! It’s sentiment that’s getting pushed along in this flow of interaction and memory that you make up in your life.

iowyth: There’s so many connections for me coming out of this. I’ve been thinking about our attempt to do land acknowledgments, to try to try to resurrect this attachment to the land or this relationship, and to some people that’s sentimental as well, but then it feels real when one is severed from that connection. It feels as though it existed, right? And so, there’s this weirdness that comes from feeling like it exists when other people can’t feel or acknowledge it as real. It’s hard to put words to what that connection feels like. We say the word connection as though there’s something that happens but what is connecting? What is connecting with what? Where is the road? It’s all inside of us, but it feels real.

Griffen Horsley: A hundred percent. This is something I push up against and deal with. It’s the weirdness of acknowledging that it’s just a lamp. That’s where I find a lot comes out of the terminologies I use. I call this process I am doing, necromancy. On the one hand, it’s a fun way to talk about it because talking about death is a heavy thing. It’s a heavy topic. These are big, swirling concepts that I’m trying to weld together. It’s helpful to have a unifying framework of terminology. Lots of people know about enchantment, right? These words help get the feelings across in ways that avoid people asking, “how could that possibly exist?” When you’re reading an essay about magic, you’ve entered the sort of magic circle that says, “we’re using metaphors to talk about feelings.” This invites people to get on board.

This is all theoretical, right guys? It’s theoretical. But then you get to the final chapter and you realise, this is serious but by then it’s too late, then you’re involved. I think there’s something to that. There’s a long history in these humanities of scholars in all sorts of fields like material cultures, talking about enchantment, making artful objects, or decorated objects, or things that are beautiful in some way. The captivation that people can feel from a well made object, often this is referred to  as enchantment, because when you are dealing with these esoteric ideas about connection and sentiment, it makes more sense to bring it back to this idea of there being some sort of spirituality associated with it. 

It’s a strange line to talk about. These invisible things that are felt as real. There’s not necessarily a force you can measure, but using these terminologies elevates them through a very conscious crafting of that terminology. Instead of relegating it to some kind of enchantment and then moving on, it’s trying to centre it, to take it a little more seriously to say, what I’m doing is effectively necromancy. There is some sort of mediumship going on, because I’m feeling some sort of connection and my feelings are real. 

I don’t like to get into the question of “are they real, or are ghosts?” That’s not something I touch on in my thesis. 

iowyth: I for one would read a thesis on whether or not ghosts are real. I like embracing these terminologies instead of trying to come up with something that feels clinical. Sometimes the only way I can write about my personal life without feeling as though I’m commodifying it, turning it into a product for this colonial neoliberal institution, this big machine that we’re all like feeding; the only way I feel as though I am approaching something with truth and respect, is to avoid using terminologies that are very structured and rigid. Sentiment doesn’t always cover it. Enchantment is a lot more flexible. We have a lot more room when we say things like enchantment or magic. People give a lot more grace in their minds. But what do these things mean? Saying “This is a meaningful representation of my sentimental, affective relationship,” that’s not really how I feel. I don’t think anyone feels their feelings in a clinical way.

Griffen Horsley: That’s something that struck me when I first learned about Research-Creation was this unfortunate reality of this institution. The university is a structure that you’re a part of. You have to create these appeasing lies. There’s a a lack of acknowledgment. It could be that I was really sad today and couldn’t come to class but you don’t have the room to say things like that even though we all can sort of agree that it should be easier to say those things. More respect should be given to people who are taking that type of space for themselves, especially coming out of the quarantine restrictions. Coming out of online schooling, the pageantry that comes along with being part of a capitalist institution is also strange. 

I want to acknowledge the reasons why we feel things. These are the reasons why we attend to these feelings, and part of attending to feelings and being in the world of affect theory and Research-Creation, is learning to be honest about the feelings you have and the feelings that other people have, including your relationships with other people. That’s something I try to make conscious in my thesis. The reality of my affective relationship with my deceased grandmother is not really considered real, it is not recognized in institutional settings.

iowyth: A lot of this stuff is so normal that I’ve started to think about it as being super-normal instead of supernatural. The super-normal to me is the, “Whoa! Look at that right there.” I ask myself why I feel this way. That’s completely it, it’s a feeling that means something. 

Griffen Horsley: It’s similar to anyone talking about “after” Covid? It’s as though Covid is over and I ask myself why we are all lying?! I’m trying to approach a more ethical way of being, which is in part being a lot more truthful. I think that’s a big part of the work that is being done in Research-Creation more broadly, trying to be earnest about the curiosities that drive you to do the work. 

For me, doing these scans and and doing these images, especially the really abstracted ones, gives me the space to toy with the idea that these objects could break. These images aren’t perfect representations of their physical forms. Some are pretty good, pretty accurate, and some are obscured washes of colour and texture. In playing with that relationship it gives me an opportunity, in the wake of my grandmother’s passing, to toy with a memory that is already fading away. Right there, there’s a terror around memory where the more things happen, the more things go on, the more your memory is also going to turn into a wash of colour and texture. Trying to visualise that is simulating something that is also happening. It is a scary thing to do and it’s an emotional thing to do but it’s also important. And again, it helps me to get to the truth. That hubristic objective truth doesn’t necessarily exist, but it helps to get to a more ethical and earnest way of feeling. So that’s where research-creation has been useful for me, enabling me to toy with these feelings, to visualise them, to make them into something that I can look at and engage with, to perceive them as though they are a work of art rather than a missing person in my life. It helps me transition out of that awful broken feeling that everyone has in the experience of death and loss. 

It’s a very strange feeling to love someone. My research-creation work allows me to put that into a different frame, a different format. That’s a little easier to wrap your head around, or at least wrap my head around and to feel as though it makes sense.

iowyth: I’m also struck by this surrounding of things through the 3D scan as kind of holding or capturing them.

Griffen Horsley: In a way, it’s almost like creating a container for them, where even if the material thing breaks, I’ve created a hyper-object out of it. It’s strange too, because of the actual act. I’ve tried to figure out a good way to not just represent the scans, but to instead represent the process of taking the scans, the actual readiness of it. The image is flattened. Obviously, it’s a 2D image. That doesn’t match up with what you see as you do an unravelling process, as you roll the object across the scanner. The scanner is flat and immovable. It’s the object that does the rotating. 

But when you look at the image, I feel an encompassing strangeness. It feels as though something has gone around it, unfolding it and opening it up. The strangeness is in medium of this work. Its limitations and its unique abilities reshape the way I think about the objects. It’s uncanny to look at my lamp, to see it “properly” formed and then also stretched out across the scanner, seeing the details of the lamp in these unorthodox ways, that are not physically possible for that material. It is a dual process of wrapping and unwrapping these objects.

iowyth: But then also you will always be excluded from the inside of it. Still, no matter how much you unwrap it, the inside is still somewhere else. There becomes an extra strange layer that is more obvious for some objects above others, depending on their shape, easier to…

Griffen Horsley: flip and look inside. Again, you’re right. I can’t distort the inside of those things, to look at the inside of the inside. Any mugs or pots or anything, I can roll them on every side except the mouth. To the scanner, the mouth is a black void. There’s a ring of material around the lip, but the actual image inside is black. The scanner only has a couple of millimetres to see in front of itself. I can make the hole into different shapes by dragging it across the scanner but I can’t get deeper into that object. So is it there? There are limitations to preservation and there’s limitations to disruption. And going along with that, in playing with these objects, I can make as many images as I want. To get into them otherwise, I’d have to break them, or I would have to come up with some new way to document them. There’s certain limitations that you just have to accept. 

iowyth: You won’t be able to capture some things, or if you want to, you would have to do something like breaking into an important object. And then, to what purpose? In breaking it apart, you are still not inside. You might want insight into their insights insides, but by breaking them, there’s only pieces.

Griffen Horsley: There often isn’t a way to get to the total truth. There’s not a way to pursue this beyond the scientific or even the photographic. The history of the photograph is very much related to this idea. Photography is seen as one of the only mediums where you can get an objective look at something but mechanisms like seeing and taking pictures, it’s also an illusion. What you see as the truth is only a snapshot, one angle of something. 

The scanner’s unique in that I can capture a couple of different angles in one image. The image takes from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes (depending on my settings). I can capture images across different spaces and times, but only along the scanner plate, and only within the limits and opportunities the object allows me. Even these opportunities present themselves as new ways of being empowered, new ways of having the agency to see different aspects through doing different things. But it’s still just a glimpse at one aspect of a thing. Trying to accept this is a big part of the endeavour. This becomes a comfortability with not being able to see the inside of the mug.

iowyth: That’s a thing about life, too. No matter how many books I read, I learn that there are even more books. I learn about how many books I know also knowing that I will never have time to read them all. I start to realise that there’s an infinite amount of knowledge to be known, so that even by drilling down into every narrow space in reality, there’s infinite places to be expanded.

Griffen Horsley: That’s why I like using necromancy as a frame for all of this, because it is a thing in pop culture and history. On one hand, it has a reputation of being dark. You don’t call something necromancy unless you think it is in some way corrupting or dangerous. The reason I’m drawn to it is because there is an opportunity to resurrect the vibrancy of a person or an object through your actions. There is a hubristic element, a pursuit of knowledge and truth that is sometimes beyond your capability or beyond any reasonable right to know. There is sometimes a kind of greed that comes with this. Necromancy isn’t always raising an army of like zombies. Sometimes, necromancy is engaging with spirits, demons, some other entity to procure knowledge that is out of your sanctioned domain. Sometimes that can be aspirational. Sometimes it’s good to “de-silo” our knowledge. Sometimes it’s good to remove barriers to power and agency. But then again, you’ve got this darker underbelly where this type of work can lead you to being possessive or materialistic. 

As we’ve seen with these institutions (universities, museums, research centres, etc), it can lead you to creating standardised modes of knowledge production and this can be limiting. I like the frame of necromancy as a figure in tension, a warning to myself. There’s an opportunity to take power over death through your continued relationship with the people that you’ve lost. Then again, you are dealing in the commodification of your personal life and feelings for an institution that is a knowledge making machine. Its main goal is to get people into an industry, moving money. The track that you find yourself on can reproduce a lot of the problems that Research-Creation points out saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing it this way.” We remain blind to the problems. I like the idea of necromancy as being something empowering as well as a warning about the things that you’re trying to point out as wrong.

It feels like if you’re going to be raising the dead, just be careful! There should be a warning, there’s a line and there should be a door! You have to really wiggle it open. There should be asterisks on all of that.

iowyth: We have been struggling, I think, with really articulating what research creation can be and what it can do. How does one do this kind of thinking? What do you know at the end of it? I wanted us to start trying to articulate what we are doing and why we are doing it. I think your project makes that very clear. There’s stuff happening to us all the time. There are real problems that we’re engaged with during our lives. We can be working through these problems in creative ways. What even is art? You painting yourself with mustard every day is art. It doesn’t matter what it is exactly as long as it’s relevant to you, and it feels productive. You’re working through it. Then you can reflect on that and glean knowledge from it. I have similar serious concerns about the institution but this is a means of exploring those spaces in-between.

I was having this funny thought that if it is a knowledge-making machine and we cry enough into it, will that break it?

Griffen Horsley: It’s almost physical. I’ve met lots of people who are feeling very similarly and not comfortable feeling that way. When you have these opportunities for multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary thinking, things get weird, coming out of hybridity. You start to have these moments like I said about Covid, you’re in a room with people talking about it as though it’s done. And you’re like, “Am I going crazy?” That feeling is exactly why I pivoted my project into this. How could I write about anything else when I’m living amongst these feelings? If I wasn’t in a grad program, I wouldn’t have time to think about this, I wouldn’t have the government of Ontario funding me to think about my relationship with my grandmother. And there’s these feelings that come up, that the Government should be paying everyone to think about their relationships. These institutions should be helping people approach their earnest feelings.

We should help each other, right? There’s so many pressing, immediate concerns that are coming out of just about every field of thought, every corner of the news, every actual person’s life. There’s so much going on, and I think there is only so long in which ignorance is bliss. There does come a point when these things have to break. And I think that’s where there is a lot of urgency coming out of my own and other Research-Creation work. I think it’s often rooted in urgency. It’s rooted in this feeling of how could I write about anything else? I am trying to treat that very honestly, to treat that with the sort of respect and seriousness that it deserves. I actually don’t think I could have written a thesis about museum policy, the language of exhibit didactics. I don’t think I could write about that, knowing all of these feelings that I’m having. How could I?

To circle back to that, something that I come back to a lot is thinking about the people who own my grandmother’s house now, people who never met my grandmother. There’s a feeling, and again, I’m sure anyone who’s ever lost someone important to them feels similarly. There’s a feeling of you wanting to scream at them, “Do you know how important these cupboards are? Do you know how important it is that this was her living room?!” 

But again, it might not have been that important to her. That’s something else, the objects and memories that I scan and talk about are things that she may not have really cared about. There’s plenty of Delft pottery I have that I’ve been scanning and it’s one of the most important icons to me in all this work, but she was trying to get rid of all of that, just before she passed away. She was saying “I have too much of this. I don’t know why I was collecting it.” Again, these things don’t always matter to everyone in every way, but the urgency that comes out of it does matter. 

Often, the best points of learning and growing come from hearing another person’s urgency. 

It comes from asking, “what is it that makes you want to pull your hair out, to jump and dance, but also scream and cry? What is it that you are compelled by and for?” That’s where we should be aiming because we have spent a lot of time doing the super-normal stuff. 

Now I’m cool with everything being on zoom, and I’m cool with everything not being on zoom again. I love being in person. It’s a complicated position to be in, to be constantly putting up and taking down barriers around your own sense of self, and your worries, concerns, and passions. It’s difficult to always be putting your stuff on the back burner. 

There’s lots of overlap with things like land acknowledgments and ecological awareness. All of this is so pressing. Often, people are looking for respite from this stuff. And I think in the little ways that we can as grad students, in an institution that doesn’t always listen to us, we can ask them to accept us as students and scholars and academics and artists. It’s important that we say, this is how I feel. This is important. Often this can help lead more people to chase their curiosity, to more people advocating for research into the things that are driving them crazy for better or for worse. That’s the goal.

iowyth: I keep coming to the same conclusion that it’s that I’m still that child who wants to do what I want to do. That I think is actually the right way. I don’t want to try so hard to be someone who wants different things.

Griffen Horsley: I don’t want to pretend I don’t have to construct some hyper-normal narrative that masks a truth we all know is happening. We all talk about it happening, but don’t put these realisations into practice. I think that’s a really really key thing to keep in mind, especially as our relationship with art and imagery and writing become jeopardised by things like AI models that just sort of reproduce consumer driven logics. Then we act like the way that we do work is not some sort of human juicer that’s constantly running, and we all need to put a roof over our heads without thinking about why we need to pay to put a roof over our heads. In fact, we make it illegal to not have a roof. These are the dire cycles that we’re all drawn into and it’s very overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to even talk about addressing all of that, but hopefully, in writing a thesis about my knick knacks…hopefully I can help contribute to an ongoing dialogue that does approach these questions, saying, “maybe if we just make stuff for reasons that aren’t money, we can get closer to treating each other respectfully, having an appreciation for the interrelationality of all things.”

iowyth: Part of it, I think, is breaking the system by breaking or blowing people’s minds. We break our minds only by telling the truth. It’s not even like you’re having to do anything new. This is easy for me. This makes sense. It’s my thing. I like it. I feel good doing it. I simply need to describe it. It’s so much more relaxing to think about the obvious stuff that I notice. People then say they appreciate you saying so because we are all calling for a rework of our ways of doing and making. It’s a tall order.

Griffen Horsley: But the reality is that the second you make it your motive to make a small bubble to try to push back, it is actually kind of easy, not because there aren’t huge blockades and resistance that makes it difficult to engage in active resistance. When it comes to writing down your feelings and making art, it turns out that it is quite easy to do when you open yourself up to that. Again, it’s the fact that so much of this is a gift economy, of knowledge production and making. 

I wouldn’t have done any of this work If it wasn’t for me reading an off-hand citation on a slide about Natalie Loveless and research creation in a lecture during my first year of the grad program. It’s only when you have that inkling that someone else has done this, that you can really start to contribute to what they’re doing. To help become part of that push against an overwhelming problem, the solution is actually much more relieving and much more relaxing than the problem itself. 

I’m actually gonna respect how I feel and I’m going to respect how you feel by being honest. I think that is the core of work, whether it’s about your recently deceased grandmother or you putting mustard on yourself, our practice, regardless of what it is that makes you do these things, it’s the advocating for it. It’s the speaking about it that helps carve out pockets of resistance and new worlds and new ways of thinking that you can inhabit. What a relief now that I know there’s people who do this. I know there’s people that talk about this. 

That’s my hope, in doing this work, someone will say “Oh, my goodness, I feel the same. Oh, my goodness! I need to think about the grief I’m not engaging with.” I need to acknowledge the pain and the curiosity and the art making and the strange relationship with writing I have, because that is honest work. That’s the real crux of Research-Creation, is to try and embrace with honesty the ease of treating yourself like a human being.