Swaddled

Danica Pawlick-Potts

Medium: Acrylic on canvas and string

For the final creative project, I created a visual piece. Since we read “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster at the beginning of the semester I had been taken with the imagery of a person being “swaddled” by a machine. In the context of the short story the swaddling seemed to have a stunting/smothering effect in that it was keeping the people safe but at the same time trapped within their pods by their own docility. However, swaddling can also be seen as a kind of nurturing—especially when we consider babies. The difference in effect, I believe, stems from the purpose and length of the “swaddling”; it can be beneficial if used as a temporary tool to nurture until someone is ready to keep progressing on their own, but if it is an indefinite practice it only serves to handicap and keep someone from growing beyond the “infant” stage. For me, this imagery highlighted the tension between how technology can help people to progress and extend our abilities, but that dependence on technology can also lead to a stagnation in growth.

This tension seemed to relate to a larger tension that I have been preoccupied with—that of trust and control. I have been fascinated by how the future can be looked at with both anxiety and hope and I believe that the hope comes because human society seems to have a drive to grow and progress, but that progress—that hope—requires trust. Trust is required because in order to change and grow risks much be taken. It is safe, you have control, if you stay with what you know and what is reliable. It is a risk to not only accept something new but to allow it to have influence and power over any aspect of your life. One example of this in the course material is the fascination and anxiety that we can see around robots in Asimov’s work. The mother in “Robbie” expresses concern over Robbie for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons seems to be because she does not understand Robbie and how he works so he makes her uncomfortable—she feels like she lacks control over situations where he is present even if he listens to her direction. However, Robbie is also a sign of status, a symbol of keeping up with the latest technology and moving forward with new technological advances. I do not think that it is a coincidence that Robbie is a nanny either, his primary function is to nurture a child and help them to develop—a new technology shaping a future generation. Still, Robbie is a new and unknown factor and there is risk associated with accepting him into Gloria’s life even though in this situation he appears as a positive influence.

So, when approaching my creative piece, I wanted to try to show the tension between the known, the predictable, the controlled and the unknown, the unpredictable, that which requires trust. I spent some time brainstorming different terms, reflecting on some of the associations that I have discussed, and I realized that I could use a pattern and a lack of pattern to visually show this tension. That became the background of the piece. On one side the background is white with a consistent pattern of the three primary colours which represents the known, the easy to follow, and the predictable. On the other side the background is black with no pattern at all, the colours are not primary, and there is a lot of empty space in order to represent the unknown, the hard to follow, the unpredictable—but there is space to grow with the start of possible patterns to build from. Then at the center is the swaddled figure. The figure is not depicted as either an infant or an adult because I wanted to show the ambiguity of the swaddling—that it could be temporary and nurturing, but it could also be smothering and preventing the person inside from growing and changing. How someone interprets the piece could reflect how they feel about the future.