Robin Tarbet'studio, 2024

Lizzie Perrotte
Afterlife: Time Travelling with Robin Tarbet

“Who gets to count as one who has the ability to die? A rock, a river, a cloud, the atmosphere, the Earth?” (Karen Barad, 2012, 93).

Many eco-critical thinkers have characterized our environmental and cultural predicaments as crises of perception and imagination. A key motivation for our SolasArts projects is to address this profound politics of aesthetics and work to recalibrate what philosopher Jacques Rancière has termed ‘the distribution of the sensible’. We seek ways to work with artists and creative practitioners to disrupt entrenched modes of perception and stimulate unknowing to cultivate more relational thinking. I recently visited Robin Tarbet’s studio in South London, having been tipped off by an artist/curator about the relevance of his eco-critical practice and exploratory ‘fieldwork’, particularly his practice of casting jellyfish on Welsh beaches. I had become interested in jellyfish as sensitive bioindicators; fragile bodies of water, co-extensive with their ocean habitat. I was drawn to their radical alterity and ongoing cultural ambivalence: faceless, formless, erotic abject, queer, and fiercely resistant to visual capture. I read a text by theorist Stacy Alaimo written in response to a current resurgence of interest in jellyfish, which she characterizes as “a fascinating and baffling admixture of science and aesthetics” (Alaimo, 2013). Alaimo proposes that jellyfish stimulate subversive ethico-aesthetics that unsettle existing perceptual regimes, rupturing and recalibrating relations between “the visible, sayable, and the thinkable” (Rancière, 2004, 63). I was curious to encounter Tarbet’s world of jellyfish and discover what else he was making.

Exploring Tarbet’s studio felt like an exhilarating form of time travel with the capacity to veer between a primeval past to a posthuman future. I imagined myself in a Medieval alchemist’s chamber, Baroque Wunderkammer, Victorian laboratory; a cabinet of curiosities crammed with aberrant wonders, where forms of nature, art, science, and technology become entangled and transformed. His studio is a place of production and display but also enchantment; a speculative environment in which familiar coordinates of location and identity are unmoored and time becomes refracted, multiple, and discontinuous. Alien Jellyfish, manifested through pink rubber moulds or luminous plaster reliefs, float across walls and crowd over tables together with casts of pot-bound houseplants, straining against domesticity. Sprouting potato specimens and their bronze-cast counterparts seemed wildly bacchanalian suspended in various cycles of grotesque metamorphoses. Tranches of rotting seaweed that once washed up on Welsh and Scottish beaches have been transfigured. They appear as flame-like spectres in the expansive luminous environs of cyanotype prints or have turned hard and geological, embedded like fossils, through the surfaces of large plaster reliefs. Propped against the studio walls, these seaweed relief structures seem to turn the studio’s Modernist architecture inside out, suggesting a seaweed afterlife with the potential for overgrowth and ruination. For a moment, they offer a visionary glimpse of a posthuman/primeval future. Once-animate beings mingle in this uncanny studio space with sculptural casts of once-inanimate objects: obsolete computer hardware (circuit boards and floppy discs), commodity packaging, broken wireless earbuds that now seem occult; queering to new identities as posthuman growths, ‘earworms’, unfamiliar marine agents; futuristic archaeological and fossil fragments.

Tarbet’s work unsettles the order of things; troubles and refuses oppositional dualisms to generate fellowship between the animate and inanimate, life and ‘NonLife’. His studio felt like a terrain vague, a mysterious wasteland, or a ‘zone of indiscernibility’. This is a term used by philosopher Gilles Deleuze to articulate a liminal space where familiar markers of time and relationality become unmoored, and taxonomic boundaries dissolve. For Deleuze, the experience of perceptual confusion and ontological reeling in such a space provides a necessary stimulus for creative unlearning. Physicist and eco-critical theorist Karen Barad has described the threshold between organic and inorganic life, which became entrenched in a post-Enlightenment ‘modern’ period, as “One of the most stubborn of all dualisms – the animate/inanimate dualism - that stops animacy cold in its tracks…leaving rocks, molecules, particles, and other organic entities on the other side of death, of the side of those who are denied even the ability to die” (Barad, 2012, 21). Artist and critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli has also called for work that challenges such oppositional dualism and othering taxonomies. She concentrates on the separation between the animate and inanimate: “NonLife is what holds, or should hold for us, the most radical potential!”; “Life is merely a moment in the greater dynamic unfolding of NonLife”. She calls for the creative animist as opposed to the Western scientist to guide an urgent process of reorientation; “someone who collapses NonLife into Life to provincialize Western thought” (Povinelli, 2016, 176).

Robin Tarbet studio table, 2024


Tarbet’s performative ‘field-work’ and commitment to the time-consuming indexical process of casting and printing from found matter gathered on-site produce another form of ‘afterlife’ and vertiginous time travel. His work revisits and revivifies the practices of Victorian scientists (botanists, marine biologists, geologists) such as botanist and early photographer Anna Atkins. She used a camera-less cyanotype process committed to the agency of objects and materials. With cyanotype, there is a direct indexicality between the plant and photographic ground. The variable density of organic matter produces the image’s variations in white opacity and transparency through the action of light and ferric salts. During this process, there is no movement of the photographer to make judgments about the depth of field, anticipate changes in scale, be responsive to the object within an environment, or make interventions in the dark room. Anna Atkins selected this process in preference to botanical drawing ‘to obtain impressions of the plants’ themselves’. Historian Barbara Gates has characterized this type of self-effacement within nature as a distinctly female articulation of the sublime; “not a rhetoric of presence so much as a rhetoric based in absence, especially absence of self” (Hunt,2005,22).

Despite such self-effacement and creative humility, the cyanotype prints of Tarbet and Atkins still carry traces of their makers’ modes of attunement and bodily rhythms: algae gathering at tide pools; handling different weights and lengths of seaweed or fern, selecting specimens, laying out a composition, adjusting with tweezers, pressing, washing, watching closely. The printed images move between empiricism and aesthetics, scientific scrutiny and enchantment. They record a complex phenomenology of fieldwork encounters. There is a ‘double consciousness’ to Tarbet’s perception of seaweed combining rigorous objectivity with reverie. His cyanotype prints tremble with ambivalence: transmitting an uncanny flux of absence and presence. They present life-size, spectral silhouettes of seaweed, suspended within bright blue grounds. The seaweeds are abstracted from specificity or habitat, appearing deathly, like bleached bones, yet radiant, like rays of light across the blue space. The prints suggest some form of transcendence; a seaweed reincarnation or afterlife, floating in the unbounded sky or deep ocean.

Tarbet’s jellyfish also pulse across thresholds of life and NonLife. They regain an uncanny sense of material force and agency in the beach-casting process. They are transformed from gelatinous rot stranded on sand to a hardened rocky imprint that returns to them a sense of a fleshy life. This vitalism and tangibility counter the familiar aesthetic of Gelata as glassy spectres from the ocean’s depths. Throughout the past century, scientists struggled to bring these elusive creatures into view as they were impossible to keep alive in aquaria or preserve in death in laboratory jars of formaldehyde. Tarbet’s jellyfish plaster casts are not memorials to jellyfish NonLife but collapse their NonLife into Life. They are speculative objects for imagining a jellyfish afterlife in a posthuman future.

Towards the end of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895), the scientist/temporal explorer drives his machine into the ‘sullen red heat’ of a far future sunset to discover a dying world and encroaching twilight.

“From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent… All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.’ And yet, at the edge of the ocean, stranded on the sand, he finds both life and NonLife in a gelatinous primeval form, ‘hopping fitfully about’:

“It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water” (Wells, 2017, np (kindle).   

References
Alaimo, S. (2013). ‘Jellyfish Aesthetics, Jellyfish Science: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible’, in Chen, C., J. MacLeod, A. Neimanis, Thinking with Water. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (https://www.perlego.com/book/3551327/thinking-with-water)

Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. New York and London: Duke University Press.

Barad, K., KalouJuelskjaer, and Nete Schwennesen. (2012). Intra-active Entanglements: Interview with Karen Barad, Kvinder, Kon and Forskning Nr, Women Gender and Research 1-2, no. 1, March 2012: 10-24. http://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28068 (Accessed: 30.07.23).

Hunt, (2005) ‘Free, Bold, Joyous: Mid Victorian Writers Love of Seaweed’, Environment and History, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2005, p.22

Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham & London.

Ranciere, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, London & New York: Continuum Press.

Wells, H.G (2017). The Time Machine, Introduction and Explanatory Notes by Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press.