Ren Gregorčič, North of a Solid Ground
A Response by Yumemi Hiraki
24 April 2021
I opened my laptop, clicked on a zoom link, as we often do in this peri-pandemic era, and listened to Kelly and Ren as they discussed Ren’s new work in Troc Talks run by Trocadero. It was an incredibly informative talk and there was a lot to take in. But most pertinently, it felt relevant.
It is relevant to now, to environmental instability, to existential and mundane thoughts and to an entropic society. North of a Solid Ground sums it all up, in its deceivingly minimal form. Peel back the layers, one by one, and it becomes deeper, more complex, my mind in a perpetually contemplative state, perhaps much like the state many of us experienced in the last year.
As I sit here warm and comfortable in the small haven of Hobart, this work and his talk paints surreal images in my mind, just to remember it is all the more surreal as it is our societal reality.
North of a Solid Ground has 3 parts; a sculptural component, a sound component and digital drawings on paper. The sculptural works are a series of cinder blocks configured in the gallery space; concrete cinder blocks and a 3D printed version. The blue 3D printed block is a replica, in a mesh that mimics the intricate textures on the block surface. Ren explained the significance of the cinder block to him. The bushfires of 2020 ravaged through Canberra, where he currently resides, and completely shifted the natural landscape into a parched, red, smoky fog. Then COVID-19 struck, and like a nimbostratus cloud, a universal seeping sense of vulnerability and emptiness took over. Through all of this, everyday he would walk past a lone cinder block that had fallen off a wall in a carpark. It grounded itself firmly, persistent and unwavering as ever, oblivious to the chaos it was surrounded by. How did this seemingly simple object withstand these shifts, and what structural qualities do they encompass that allows them to function the way they do?
This thought took me off guard. In my personal work, I’ve constantly been inspired by the way nature finds gaps in manmade spaces. Sometimes they grow through these cracks and remind us that they're here, like roots that create bumps in pavements or tiny flowers that persevere through broken crevices. I've pondered about the facades of our concrete jungles and the concealed underlying network of nature that we often times neglect.
Though I have constantly thought about structures that surround us, I seemed to have been blind to the other side of the story, the structures of these facades; the realm of the cinder blocks. Until now, I hadn't given them much thought other than them being flat, solid objects, a slab of concrete, a wall. But they are certainly much more than just simple slabs. The cinder blocks follow their own algorithms and encompass a space within, wherein each individual piece plays a part to create a larger fabrication. I peer out of my window at identical apartment blocks and realise they work much in the same way. My mind kept bouncing between the natural and fabricated structures that both occupy the same space, sometimes intersecting, but adhering to their own set of rules and methods.
The rage of the bush fires challenged the existing natural structures, then with much needed rain, normalcy took place once again. The pandemic made the occupiers of urban spaces disappear, leaving the vacant architectural forms to eerily loom atop one another.
In the aforementioned unprecedented times, cinder block systems proved to be successful. It seems to be doing something right, making this research topic all the more intriguing. Additionally, I feel the universality of the cinder blocks underpins constructed spaces globally, while also referring to a unified front as each nation takes action on our shared experience of COVID-19.
My former thoughts of persistence of nature in the turmoil of the city is now heavily altered. Perhaps the turmoil is, to city structures, the shifting natural elements and the occupants that inhabit these spaces.
The installation is also home to a soundscape that Ren has produced using a method called photogrammetry. Simply put, this is the process of taking hundreds of images of a solid object from every angle, upload it into a program, which creates a mesh of a 3D object using coordinates of points in space. This mesh is then transformed into sounds to produce a track which becomes an audible representation of every surface of the solid object. As Ren mentioned in Troc Talks, NASA has been investigating with creating tracks that represents the surfaces of the sun, and he was inspired to do something similar. I wondered then how the sun relates to his work, but a particular image stuck in my mind and it started to make sense. He mentioned during quarantine, there was an oval he visited often to simply lie down and watch the anticipated movement of the sun, moon and mercury as it dipped past the horizon. This repetitive scene seemed dreamlike and otherworldly to me. The imagery of these celestial bodies as an expansive presence that overlooks and govern our earthly structures and us. It felt perhaps the unwavering stillness of architectural forms to us and our cities, are similar to a reliable anchor in which it is the sun, to its orbiting planets...
Back to the sound...
I think Ren takes these ethereal and somewhat indecipherable ideas and breaks them down into digestible components. Sound, like these thoughts, are intangible and invisible but its vibrations can be very much a visceral experience. The recording is played through a set of vibrating speakers, which emit frequencies that transmit through physical objects occupying the space. This changes the cinder blocks from static to something in flux as the vibrations envelop the objects as a whole. This was also a clear and direct link for me to scientific principles, in which particles of a solid object are compacted, constantly in vibration against one another; a reference to yet another structure system.
I view this sonic component as an invisible yet audible filter that helps us decipher the language of the cinder block. It is a voice descriptor, that has the ability to transpire one block into many, vibrating and sharing its voice. It can amplify and spread, like the seeping pandemic or smoke from a bushfire, connecting one place, one thing to another as it moves through bodies and overwhelm us with its invisible presence.
And I feel, this could feel just like the warmth or the glare of the sun.
The final element in this body of work are digital drawings, or what Ren calls elevations. They are produced through the final stages of the photogrammetry process, where the program seems to create its own algorithms of operations to understand intersections between the object simulated and in real life. These are represented in a series of numbers and form a sculptural drawing in a lattice like shape. To me these elevations function like a blueprint of a score, an afterthought, or an encyclopedia of knowledge in a long lost language we cannot decode yet. The algorithms are another structure. In a way it reminds me of technological advancements created by humans that we cannot keep up with; the development of a sense of their own mind that we are just spectators of. When I view them this way I feel a sense of admiration for these images, and its organised composition. Each element all connected and feeding off one another. Though I don’t understand the relationship between these numerals, it strangely feels familiar, perhaps as a metaphor of the interconnectivity we need between ourselves and others. We are all linked in some way to one another and therefore to the world.
And like the lone cinder block in the parking lot, it wasn’t really alone, it was part of a structure it relied on and was relied upon. As we are, all in our own multitude of systems.
North of a Solid Ground uses the universality of cinder blocks as a departure to investigate the range of systems that coexist as our society. It questions its functionality and mechanisms, its flaws and the linkages between each constituent. It reminds me of the synergy between natural and fabricated environments all the while being grounded in the embrace of one vast celestial system. There is a sense of the hidden still, the unknown workings I am surrounded by, yet I feel a strange sense of comfort in not knowing, embraced in a part of their ever present vibrations.
@yumemihiraki