A Critical View of the Fragments Series by Astrid Bastin
The sculptures focus on a traumatic experience and carry the tragedy of a dysfunctional life. Named after a specific weapon, ‘Hamdy HAK-1, is a body with legs but no head, no arms, no feet, where life and death coexist as an affirmation of life itself. The expressive power of this sculpture grows slowly; it deepens with time, sustained contemplation and with the growing understanding of the social and political associations. It reaches the point where figuration and abstraction cohabite and where the visual, the social and the political converse.
It is of particular significance to Blake's work that the bodies without limbs are not broken down into parts distinct from each other. It remains a body, though, only as a disfigured and dysfunctional one where abstraction is not the model. The sculpture is a container of broken down parts allowing abstraction into figuration. Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari's philosophy explains, "What remains when you take everything away is the degree zero". This is the confrontation between the space and the material. The Fragments are figures whose heads are dismissed but whose torsos stand in.
Perhaps what is outrageous in Blake's' sculptures is the "degree of intensity" in which life and death are depicted. The life of the landmine victims is a constant struggle between their mutilated bodies and the memory of their absent limbs. Blake's Fragments speak of the continuation of life which has already encounter death and which carries the scars of tragedy. The sturdiness and solidity of Bronze, Iron and Marble counteract the fragility and vulnerability of the real human body: the skin, the bones, the hair and most importantly of life itself. The marble base that holds the bodies in place acts as a metaphor for the mines that shatter a land that seems stable.
Fragments evokes the silence as the only remains of the atrocity; the fearful silence of the survivor and the redemption of the "true witness", the dead. Blake is interested in the non-spoken aspects of these events and his responsibility as an artist is to testify to them. Similar to Emmanuel Levinas, Blake invests in the responsibility that comes from the knowledge that has been passed to him. Fragments are a testimony of the victims.
Blake is clearly informed by a number of artistic, cultural and philosophical influences: From Emmanuel Levinas, to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari from Michaelangelo to Joseph Beuys. Blake's historical roots start in a small town in Northern Canada that serves as a frontier point between the wilderness of the artic and the chaos of modernity.
By Astrid Bastin
August 2005
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