Kiss My Heart, 2000

Julia K. Steele

Speaking in Tongues is the title of Rachelle Chinnery's latest show, comprised of fourteen hand-built clay vessels. The title is curious in that "speaking in tongues" usually refers to an ecstatic religious state practiced by Pentecostal Christians whereby they cry out during church service. According to the Pentecostal faith "speaking in tongues" is taken as evidence for the mysterious way the Holy Spirit moves through a congregation. Chinnery's pieces certainly have a kinship to this sense of mystery. The writing on them is mostly indecipherable, although just enough words are legible--just enough so that we get a sense of the recognizable: 'I, hope, last, my'. We experience a fleeting understanding: a sense that sense is just out of reach. As such these vessels stand before us chatting away about something that is a hair breath away from our grasp. We might long for full communion with the narratives that are scratched and etched into these pieces, but instead our desire for full disclosure is swallowed up by the generous mouths of these cryptic vessels.

Chinnery has chosen the name of each vessel by picking out a few legible words on individual pieces and producing a phrase from them. The central piece is "Kiss My Heart", a deeply poetic and impossible demand. While illogical, "kiss my heart" is a phrase that we feel the meaning of to the core of our beings. We might respond by saying: "I know what you mean" without ever being able to articulate why. The fleeting meaning of the individual pieces and phrases, and the emotions they inspire, leave me feeling like Caliban. I too have woken from a beautiful ephemeral dream and cry to dream again. The titles of these pieces hint at endless possible ways of ciphering them. What does "Veil of Kindness" refer to: a hidden kindness or a false, obfuscating kindness? How is a clay container a veil and how does it embody kindness? Is this piece benign or is it subterfuge? How can a wave be a guardian? Who is the sister of Joy? How can longing-an emotional state-be unfurled like a carpet or piece of cloth? The "Speaking In Tongues" pieces through their disrupted and cryptic narratives inspire an intense, barely understood, felt response. It is as if they contain secret and conflicting truths about our shared humanity.

The vessels by their round, bulbous and fecund shapes evoke a strong feminine principal, but by their very floridness also a phallic kind of power--many of the pieces are even horned. The vessels are a mixture of vegetable and flesh onto which Chinnery has carved streams of words-Logos. These vessels as such marry feminine and masculine principals. They are a coalescing of binary oppositions: man and woman, word and flesh. Perhaps these vessels can be understood as pointing to our collective desire to make the word flesh.

To make the word flesh, if we lay aside for the moment the Christian ramifications and take up instead the post modern psychoanalytical connotations of this phrase, we can think of the phrase as signifying the impossible dream of healing the split between the signifier and the signified--that is the split between the physical word and its meaning. We can think of it as representing the failure of language to contain the whole of experience in the similar way our ego consciousness also fails to account or take in the whole of our experience--our bodily experience that is not contained by language. Chinnery's breaking of narrative over the bodies of her gorgeously replete vessels captures a truth about our relationship to language and our physical existence. We forget our bodily selves in our cerebral moments and yet what is the reality of the cerebral compared to the body? There is a body in space. Inside that body is a mind that spins scenario after scenario. What is real? What is more important? Do I continue to breath so that I can continue to produce this endless narrative? Or do I produce this narrative so I can continue to breath? When I look at "Kiss My Heart", what is more important, the surface or the shape? Can we make such choices?

In the beginning was the Word. An organizing principal meant to differentiate between mind and matter and establish the importance of logos (words, reason) over the flesh. Words of course are spoken. They are formulated in the mind and then pushed out of our bodies from the breath of our lungs up through our tongue, teeth and lips. A word is said and then it slides away breaking up into molecules of oxygen, carbon and water. Perhaps someone is listening and now my words live on inside of another's mind for as long as memory breathes life into them. The words, they are repeated, loved, misunderstood, half heard, ignored. They construct illusions that seem as real as anything. They have devastating consequences. They hold the key to our understanding and mistrust of one another. They are empty rhetoric. They are truth. There are many of them written across the fanciful shapes of Rachelle Chinnery's strangely beautiful clay vessels.

Julia Steele is a writer and potter living in Vancouver.