Temporalities of entanglement in the work of sculptor Zoe Wu, by Pip Hudd

published in REVIEW magazine: https://review.supplies

We are made in our relations to others: our choices become meaningful through their investment in us. The entanglements of care and sometimes wounding that wrestle the fullness of existence out of inanimate matter has a specific temporality that pinpoints the exact now of the embodied present. This temporality of care is the focus of Zoe Wu’s Húlu (2024), exhibited recently for the first time

Delicate ceramic gourds emerge from each other and drip towards the floor. They resemble stalactites – appearing to be frozen in time but expectant of the moment of release in which the new appears from the old. Despite its stillness, the whole scene comes to revolve around the tension of this looming moment and becomes animated by it.

On closer inspection, these delicate ceramic gourds cease to be formations of rock but of human bodies stratified by time, pulled by gravity to emerge out of each other: one generation to the next.

The title Húlu evokes nostalgic memories of Wu’s childhood and hints at the relations of care in which she is interested: the enmeshment between mother and child. Whilst the exact moment of birth clearly concerns the artist, we should not read her as restricted only to this. Instead, she surveys all of the ways in which we make and unmake each other across generations in a perpetual freefall of becoming. Equally, whilst actual mothers and children originate Wu’s work, they are not exhaustive of it. The twin position of carer and cared for do not necessarily fall neatly along gendered or genetic family lines. We all have the potential to mother just as we are all dependent on our entanglement with others as the child is.

But for Wu, the relations of care through which we make each other can never bind us completely. The precise moment of the drip, in which each gourd squirms itself free from the one above is also the emergence of a singular unique being. We are never fully alike to those who make us, no matter how much they might want us to be, or how hard we might crave their nostalgic familiarity. Exact replication is impossible even if it were desirable. The old always silently contains a glinting fragment of the possibility for the new waiting to be dislodged.

The embodied tactility and material fragility of Wu’s gourds remind us that the original is always linked to the arrival of the unique physical and tenuous body. Our conversations use the words and symbols that we are taught by others and which connect us to them. But there is more to our speech than the logical and decodable information the words we use convey. When we speak, we incessantly turn our mother tongue over in our mouths and inflect it with an irreplicable singularity that marks the moment of innovation. Our words have another meaning that goes beyond their calcified rationality – they break from the old in the inflection given to them by the unique physical imprint of their user. The shape of our tongues, mouths and chests, as well as the accent acquired from those who surround us, create a distinctive vocal signature that has a meaning beyondthe logic of the words we speak to herald the possibility of emergent newness. When the child laughs, they do not describe the new for they cannot yet imagine a world beyond their mother, but nonetheless the chime of their laugh is newness manifest. 

This points us towards an uneasy relationship between old and new present in Wu’s work. As the example of speech shows, it is paradoxically our enmeshment in the language of those that implicate us in the shared social world that allows our natal uniqueness to emerge. Without the connection that language allows we could not distinguish ourselves from those with which it ensnares us. It is only by trying to replicate the speech and mannerisms taught to us by those who care for us that the unique modulations of our bodies transform the uniformity of a word into the moment of the emergence of the new. Wu’s forms hang from each other by a thread, poised at the ambivalent moment splitting intimacy from departure. They situate themselves at the moment where fingertips brush against each other in their final lingering touch of goodbye or the glance over the shoulder as a loved one leaves on a long journey. She captures the moment of separation from the nostalgic through which we define ourselves as different and asserts that it is only in the terms of that which is safe and whole that the uniqueness of our bodies can point towards the thrill of something beyond.

In the vertical arrangement of her sculpture Wu references the Greek Philosopher Epicurus' understanding of change. For him, atoms fall endlessly downward in a void, unchanging, until they spontaneously swerve to create the possibility for the new. Without the swerve, all that we would have is the blinding light of an unchanging language endlessly repeating the monotony of words official meanings. This would be a world of automatons communicating only to arrange things ever more efficiently. Through this sculpture., Wu adds to Epicurus that it is the emergence of the physical body: cared for and brought into being by another that creates the possibility for the swerve. It is only through our caring relations of similarity and replication that the novel can surface via our distinctive embodiments.

Unlike language or thought, which makes plans for the future and remembers the past, the body remains fixed in the exact present. Even when the body ‘remembers’ a past trauma it does so by a compulsion in the now. The nudge of our unmistakable vocal signature can only be meaningful in the moment in which it occurs. It cannot be codified or described but must be experienced. The bodily singularity that marks the emergence of the new always sits atop a crashing wave, always about to tip forward into the future. Once the gleaming experience of embodied speech has passed, it is gone forever: fossilised into the futility of our attempts to recapture it by describing it. The singularity that emerges out of our relations of care, via the body, always does so in the exact present – the bodily uniqueness is also a temporal uniqueness. Both are never to be repeated twice, and hence have incomprehensible intrinsic value. The precise moment in which the carer drips into cared for and allows for the possibility of their distinct nudge that brings the possibility of the new is waited for with bated breath. 

This bated breath alludes to the anxiety of the moment of natality. That the moment of release also contains the fear of falling. Wu’s gourds hang precariously, we envision them crashing into the gallery floor and shattering. The drip is a moment of release from being bound but also a moment of separation and unknowability. When our stomach drops during a steep descent on a rollercoaster we remember the moment of birth, the first detachment from the mother in which we became unique and embodied. This exhilarating but frightening moment contains all that it is to be free: to step out from the safety of the given onto the precipice of the now and create anew for oneself. In this sense Wu aims at the very heart of the creative process and shows its parallel with birth: to make art is to stake one’s bodily uniqueness in the exact present by claiming to create something with value as yet unrecognised by another and only backed up by one’s own convictions. If the body has no authority to give value to the new then this is felt in the anxiety at its creation.

Ultimately, despite the title’s nostalgia, Wu points us to the infinitesimal moment in which we break free from that which was given to us by those who care for us. We must create in reference to that which we find nostalgic and safe but we are unable to be bound by its terms because our bodies are restless and unruly: they urge us on and out into the new.

Writing by Pip Hudd, piphudd0@gmail.com, 07477566799

Pip, (24), is an art writer and political theorist interested in complicating our understanding of care and community and their relation to radical politics. They live and work in East London and have a BA from the University of Oxford and MA from King’s College London.