finished?

What is finished?

The poet Paul Amboise Valéry said: ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’.
 Usually, we don’t show work until it is finished.     How do we know when that is?

Baking seems to me, as a mum to be an ‘unfinished’ process: crack the egg; mix the dough; form the desired shape; bake; eat; gone; start again.   This process is of giving pleasure, of presenting family or friends with an object of delight to consume with the eyes, nose and then with the mouth.  When is it finished?   The thought of that pleasure can stay with the consumer even into adulthood.  In an essay in Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle, called the Rolling Pin,  Susan Pollak  describes a situation of a man who was a writer with writer’s block.  He remembered biscuits bought for him by his estranged father when he was a boy.   The emotional power of the biscuits was such that when he bought some himself and left them for a day to age, as happened in his childhood, and then ate them he was able to remember and feel things that he had blocked.  They became a catalyst for telling stories to his own children about his father.  They were also the lock and key to his writer’s block.  The biscuits bought by the father years before were still being ‘tasted’ by the man, his children, his readers, and readers of that story etcetera.  Turkle referred to a passage from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past of a similar experience while eating a madeline.  Both edible delights seem to me ‘unfinished’.

I imagine that the origins of cooking tools is almost as old as human kind and the basic structure of baking is still fairly similar - binding, shaping, heating.  The objets for this practice would also be similar - objects that contain, bind, shape and hold.  These objects have a particular relationship with the human body and in particular the hand.  The hands themselves can contain, bind, shape and hold, though they are not completely suitable for baking.  Humankind needed objects that were projections of the hands and were more practical for the job.  Bricolage and never ending tool designing was born and a special relationship with humankind and tools began.

The tool/human relationship does not end with the physical.  There is the possibility of an emotional relationship as well.  Susan Pollak also addresses the emotional attachment to objects that happen.  Within the text Rolling Pin, Susan Pollak writes of the inheritance of her Grandmother’s rolling pin.  She describes telling stories to her children as she bakes and notices that the rolling pin connects her to her grandmother and the life that was hers.   The rolling pin also has the potential to create future memories.  I interpret her text as suggesting that objects can be vessels that hold memories waiting to be evoked.  She sites D W Winnicott who has looked at the ability for sentiment, recollections and inspiration to be stored within objects.  This suggests to me that objects, like a good ( or bad ) cake, can be unfinished as they hold the memories of their users and have the potential to transfer those memories.

This poor egg.  The bit at the top I believe to be the culprit.  It is fine as I kind of like the disturbing nature of the egg as it is.  It is filled with ice at the moment because I will try to planish using the ice as a stake.  This technique was suggested by Ray Norman  a respected and much loved metalsmith and shit stirrer.  I will see how it goes.
The writing above is unfinished.