Hephaestus, (Roman equivalent: Vulcano), was banished from Olympus because of his ugliness or/and physical impairment. The story goes, he was ‘only ugly’, and acquired impairment after being pushed down from the mountain by Zeus, deforming his foot. Either way, he ended up abandoned. Hephaestus fell short of Hellenic standards of a god with an ideal body. Under such standards, even art, architecture, literature and drama had to present a similar harmony.
The failed god Hephaestus, just like Homer, author of ‘Iliad and Odyssey’, was an example of a ‘Super Creep’. He had a set of skills that meant society overlooked his impairment. His skills justified his inclusion. This kind of justification reminds us of how, in our culture, ‘super creeps’ feature in cinematography. The message is that if you have special powers or skills, despite disability, you can be included, or rather, have a place among other gods. The ‘ugly’ Hephaestus happened to be a great blacksmith. He made beautiful armour and jewelry. These skills redeemed him.
VN: “In my home country, Poland, during the Communist era, we saw this kind of limited ‘redemption’ practiced. At that time, Wiktor Dega’s booklet, "Crippled Child", underlined how work should be possible even if confined to one’s bed with a disability. The idea here was that work as an adult will ensure the rebuilding of self-esteem in the face of disability. Dega set out that the disabled should refute abnormality and fit within the rigid bounds of normality, a word that derives from the application of a fixed angle, the carpenter’s square. Abnormality, under these terms, should be rejected; the rule of the carpenter’s tool should apply, should be the rule. Only the normal is valued. As with the deformed foot of Hephaestus so too with my sinusoidal spine. So too with Professor Crawford’s eczema.”
As Hephaestus saved himself through work, by fitting in with ‘normality’ and being useful, earthquakes prefigured the valued activity in his workshop. What I call ‘the inside breathing of the earth’ also featured in the Roman figure of Volcano. Away from the ideal of harmony, and the standards of beauty applied in Greek and Roman mythology, this breaking through and eruption remind us of the much later rough, broken and asymmetrical Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi. From this perspective, we see the value of the cracked earth, the way that the golden red larva oozes out, announcing fragmentation, change and reforming. Fresh lava glues the ground back together in a natural although less explicit natural Kintsugi: the ceramics of broken beauty. Geologically, we may imagine a larger, global broken and repaired pot: Mother Earth. The imperfection, the eruption, has purpose, beauty. It ensures life on the planet.
PC: “The body’s skin subject to eczema, which in Greek means ‘boiling over’, mimics this encrusting, flaring up and imperfection of such geological phenomena. It can evoke replacement, regeneration and aging. People think of it as an abnormality, something to reject, repulse, rather than part of the diverse and beautiful asymmetry of life. The broken encrusted skin of eczema can bring unique psychological journeys, sometimes positive, sometimes dark. The trick is not dispose of it as ‘abnormality’—we should find its own unique beauty: a newly imagined, gold-laced Kintsugi skin. Living with eczema can be hard but living with a sense of abnormality and rejection is harder still. In Trickster, my voice is the voice of me as a child, living with society’s judgment of ‘abnormality’.”
VN: “I recall climbing to Mitikas, the highest top of the Olympus massif, stepping on the ‘Wickedness Steps’ called after Kakia (goddess of vice and moral badness). I sat on the ‘Throne of Zeus’ and cried loudly from the depths of myself, with my beautiful spine. Like Professor Crawford, the ‘child with old hands’, I enfolded into my old fears. My head was heavy, body shaking, imagining my final fall after such a steep climb. Why did I climb anyway? Why do we have to be ‘Super Creeps’? I hear the comforting sound of a vacuum cleaner. It comes from beneath the ground. Maybe, like Hephaestus, in the end I would feel better under the volcano, at the far end of the mountain range, the beginning of all, and himself.”
As artists and academics, in Trickster, we share a Kintsugi redemption of our own making. Skin or spine, abnormality is not the vision. The vacuum can blow as well as suck. It can rain down gold that is abnormal skin replenishing, splendid, healing. New spine, old spine. New skin, old skin. The trick is to see it in our heads.
Website design: Piotr Paweł Adamczyk