Eileen Agar: Marine Object

Eileen Agar was a British artist who was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements.

Her works are generally paintings and collages however she was known to create sculptures as well.

Her most well-known sculpture is called Marine Object (1939), which can be considered an abstract sculpture in the sense that it is not a representation of a specific thing or in other words it is not figurative. It consists of a broken amphora and flotsam and crustacean Agar found on a beach.

Agar suggests that the way she worked with Marine Object is similar to collage. She refers to her work as ‘a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence.’¹ Agar basically means that she puts together found materials pretty much randomly to create her sculptures. This style of working is common in abstract sculptures because of the fact that their roots lie in Cubism.

According to Greenberg, Braque and Picasso influenced abstract sculptors.

In his essay, ‘The new sculpture’ Greenberg argues, ‘…tends to abandon stone, bronze and clay for industrial materials like iron, steel, alloys, glass, plastics, celluloid…’² When we consider Marine Object, we can see that this is likely to be true. Similarly, Braque and Picasso used a wide range of materials that had never been used in Fine Art before. In the frame of Still Life with a Chair Canning, Picasso simply used a rope which is not a material that is thought to have any artistic value. Agar also used objects that weren’t necessarily precious or expensive whilst creating Marine Object.

In addition to this, the fact that Marine Object consists of random juxtapositions makes it very similar to collage which is working with found materials. Agar created her work by putting found objects together, making it obvious that Cubism was a huge source of inspiration. Marine Object deals with the transformation of the materials. The way Agar transformed the materials is one of the things that make the work different from figurative sculptures. Non-abstract sculptures are created by sculpting with the materials whereas Agar simply focuses on putting the materials together. She didn’t try to hide what they were but instead transformed their meanings into something much more emotional rather than representational. Greenberg suggested ‘…a work or its parts can be cast, wrought, cut or simply put together [but] it is not so much sculptured as constructed, built, assembled, arranged.’³

Marine Object is a great example of Greenberg’s definition as the materials Agar used are obvious.

Rather than changing what they are or how they look, she tried to find a way to display them together. This transformed their functions and therefore their meanings. The fact that their meanings were changed suggests that Agar’s sculpture was given a new flexibility. It no longer aimed for perfection, instead, it focused on emotions.

Marine Object makes a reference to Agar’s childhood because collecting seashells she found on the beach was something she enjoyed a lot as a child. This allowed her to communicate with the audience through her work because it is used as a souvenir. Anthony Caro aimed to communicate with the audience by making ‘… not a picture of someone crying but a sculpture that makes you cry.’⁴ It is possible to see a similar idea behind Marine Object. By displaying the objects she found as souvenirs, Agar added an autobiographical element to her sculpture. The fact that the work symbolises a particular place or time made it more personal and allowed Agar to communicate with the audience efficiently. Her sculpture doesn’t depict her own emotions but it makes the audience feel them. This particular way of representing oneself also presented a challenge to conventional sculptures as they tend to deal with visual representations.

One can suggest that Marine Object makes a lot of references to Cubism and Braque and Picasso’s style of work.

This is very important as it allows the audience to get a better understanding of abstract sculptures by exploring their origin. Knowing how Cubism developed into abstract sculptures enables us to explore the artists’ intentions. Because Agar made her inspiration source clear, we are able to come to the conclusion that she used random juxtapositions to create Marine Object, meaning she focused on the relationships between the materials she found. Agar transformed their functions to represent her childhood and communicate with the audience more effectively.

References:

[1]: Agar, E. (1988). A Look At My Life. Methuen.

[2]: Ibarra, P. (2015). Beautiful Trash: Art and Transformation. Garbage. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/beautiful-trash/

[3]: Hall, C. (2012). Wrought Havoc. The Carpentry Way. https://thecarpentryway.blog/2012/12/wrought-havoc/

If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more, you can subscribe here — https://medium.com/subscribe/@ella_harris to get an email whenever I publish a story. You can also buy me ☕ via — https://ko-fi.com/ella_harris