MIA MULVEY Studio

Collaboration with Poet Bin Ramke

2019

“Mattering” as a verb might suggest a process by which matter is made, or made to appear, or made to matter. Each of us deal, in this work we now present, with matter: with its transformations, transmutations, and translations. All of our makings embody an awareness of the hiddenness of many processes, even the processes of meaning-making, of legibility. 

Because Earth is central to our existence and our art, in the form of clay and in the various metaphorical instances and insistences of clay, the poems produced during this collaboration, produced in the presence of the materials of ceramics, can be considered a translation of a poem from Middle English, “Earth took of Earth.” 

The sculptural objects reflect both on the poems and the conversations that connected the artist and poet. The invisible threads that form these connections stretch beyond what is physically present as we explore the act of collaboration. 

Part of the conditions we considered while making and transforming things by means of earth, air, fire, and water. And thought, and experience: we are concerned with “media,” with things that get between the world and the self and thus prevent immediate experience. Or, things that enable a connection between outside and inside, world and self.

Collaboration with Amanda Small

2012

Artists Mia Mulvey and Amanda Small worked collaboratively to create an installation titled Thaumazein. The word, a Greek verb meaning "to wonder", is both contradictory and oppositional, rational and irrational, and has clear associations with looking and seeing. Thaumazein implies that one gets a glimpse of this unexpressed world and the spaces in-between.

Using symbols, fragments, echoes, and traces as frameworks from their global and physical locations, they intermix these with indications from their personal, domestic landscapes. Mulvey and Small are creating a visual conversation about place and character through vestiges of the world they live in, both shared and separate.

Through this ongoing conversation Mulvey and Small are expanding their ideas about wonder and its philosophy. A symbolic language has been created to reveal the intangible spaces of their collaboration and dissection of the roots of the Greek word thauma: "To look at something with wonder".