written by Àngels Miralda / edited by Jenny Wilson

Arms reach up and forwards, forming a circle, expanding the body and encapsulating a void. This spherical shape contains all, traversing time backwards and forwards into the infinite. Movement loops within the thresholds of architecture and its relation to the human scale. As the potter’s wheel spins outwards, the hand moves closer, throwing down clay. The clay is reminiscent of a body, malleable, soft and transformed, spinning on a circular platform. Warped and rounded, smoothed and thinned, spinning into a delicate thing, thrown and caressed on a platform – ever spinning outwards.

In Ruta Butkute’s practice, sculpture is situated within a spatial realm shared by time, gesture and bodies in motion. Objects expand beyond modern concepts of autonomy, entering a field of related networks of agency that create and aid temporal choreographies. If modernism was defined by the object in itself – autonomous, separate and outside of this contextual world – the contemporary object is in effect embedded in a flux of time, constantly passing. In this way, Butkute’s process involves sculpture as performance, performance as object, and space as a symbolic constellation that relates to our movement through the world.

In Heidegger’s famous metaphysical essay “The Thing”, an object can be understood only in relation to its use.1 His famous example is that of a vase: defined not by the material that forms the vase but by the negative space that allows the material to enact the verb of containing. Spatiality is thus already built into the definition of the vase and so is the “nearness” of ourselves to this object. Only the vase – which is of a certain proportion in relation to the body and which can be held and can contain matter – is considered an object worthy of such definition.

When it comes to the concept of Dasein in relation to objects as equipment, Heidegger looks to the hammer. This tool is defined as “ready-to-hand” because its shape is adapted to the human hand. It is named and exists as an extension of the hand and its reason-for-being relates to the anthropos.2 The hammer comprises various material components, but what makes it “ready-to-hand” is the ability to use it to further our own constructions. The tool as an extension of the hand is not unidirectional: although we control what the tool is used for, it also dictates the shape and form of our hand during its use.

The body is a mental measure of the world, or so it seemed for quite a while. If the previous decades have explored the possibility of time without humanity in books such as Time without Becoming by Quentin Meillasoux3 or in the agency of objects still within human networks of correlation according to Graham Harman4, Speculative Realism has circled back to Kant’s sublime in Timothy Morton’s development of the concept into the Hyperobject.5 Within these recent experiments into pure materiality and time without limits, the centrality of the body within human thought makes for a stark appearance. The idea of “correlationism”, a term coined by Meillasoux, lies within Butkute’s work which posits the sculpture as an intermediary – one that does

not exist without a network nor without motion. Rather than attempting to de-anthroposize the world, Butkute’s work acknowledges and embellishes our relation to the world through material and spatial experiments – relating the body to all of our surroundings.

Performing the Object

In the performance Collide (2023), made in collaboration with performer Yurie Umamoto, a mobile sculptural element occupies the floor of a large exhibition space. It appears as an obstacle at first. But when the performer’s mediated motions shift the wheels of this ‘obstacle’, it expands and contracts, and becomes a partner in a coordinated dance led by human gestures. This expanding and contracting network of lines connects a series of wheeled discs that are adapted to occupy an expansive space.

Previous performances have broached the topic of circularity and centripetal force through architectural form. In Two Bowlines (under a strain) (2015) a performer is placed on top of a large wooden circle that spins around and reacts to the motions of a dancer’s body. Standing, lying down, folding with the motion, the dancer lies on top of this enlarged potter’s wheel – a rotating disc onto which the body is continuously thrown and reformed. The connection between the body and the world of matter beyond it is flung into a network of relation in which one cannot exist without the other.

Spatial and Performative Gestures

Drawing from established sculptural techniques and ceramic traditions of porcelain, Butkute has continuously explored the spatiality of the object and our human relation to this equation. While these objects have generally been positioned in the space to create choreographies, her latest series turns this around to focus on the performativity of the maker. Using methods that create analogies to traditional processes of production, Butkute does not include but implies the body – the work results in a material archive of motion, contained within the invisible folds that dwell beneath the surface. (In previous works such as Tumble #3 (2021), the object has also been displayed as an archive.)

The porcelain pieces’ geological layers reveal this process, offering the viewer a glimpse into the multiple throws that have produced the pigmented flat surface of these works. A minimal but impactful piece of layered dark clay serves as a grammatical caesura in the gallery space. By firing the clay at too high a temperature, it begins to melt and darken. With a ragged edge reminiscent of broken coal, the work sits between the organic and inorganic, its materiality no longer discernible. When positioned on the wall, the work connects language and gesture in a grammatical uplifting, like a conductor’s baton, to signal a sigh or a pause in their material finality.

1. Martin Heidegger, 1949. “The Thing,” In Bremen Lectures, (https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/BremenLectures/TheThing.html)
2. Eternalised, 2021. “Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand”, (https://eternalisedofficial.com/2021/02/02/ready-to-hand-and-present-at-hand-heidegger/)
3. Quentin Meillasoux, 2008. Time Without Becoming, Middlesex University, (https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.pdf)
4. Tsaiyi Wu, 2020. “A Dream of a Stone: The Ethics of De-Anthropocentrism”, De Gruyter, Open Philosophy. 5. Ecology Without Nature, 2011. “A Speculative Sublime” (https://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/03/speculative-sublime.html