Philosopher’s Walnuts

Philosopher’s Walnuts interrogates these cultural constructs and their lasting effects through juxtaposition, material valuation, hybridity, economics, and beauty. Through the use of fairytales in marketing, capitalist interests have created a cycle of consumerism, resulting in prescribed behaviors, social systems, hierarchies and ultimately both psychological and ecological pollution.  The glowing, gilded pieces use the fairy tale motif to situate questions about notions of artistic value and beauty. From a distance, they shimmer and glow, beckon and firmly establish themselves in the realm of the valued and desired, Beauty. Upon closer inspection, however, the objects deconstructs themselves as lowly materials and disturbing figures emerge. It is this juxtaposition which launches questions about beauty, age, material value, commodity and desire.

My fascination with walnuts began as I was researching the Cinderella tale for another project. There are over 500 versions of the storyline which all follow the general outline of what is commonly known in English speaking countries as “Cinderella” – many agree that the very first version originated in China (Yeh Shen: https://fairrosa.com/2015/07/13/investigating-yeh-shen-and-the-chinese-cinderella-myth/). One version of the tale, from what was then known as Czechoslovakia, featured the walnut as the magical entity (which in Yeh Shen is a fish and in the Disney version is a fairy godmother).  It was the image of the magical walnut which captured my attention.

I was already living in China at the time and had seen walnuts being sold – in markets as food and in shops as objects to be held and used for medicinal purposes. On impulse, I bought some and began to consider them for their material value. I was unsure how to use them exactly, only knew that the end result would need to be something that created a sense of awe or reverence. Quite early in my experiments, I was reminded of the German practice of making ornaments from the shells and knew that my shells were small worlds and needed to contain stories and/or characters.

Research into folk-, fairy-, and historical- tales led to ideas about transmutations and hybrid characters. Many fairytales have to do with talking animals; things that turn into other things; etc. I began to think about mutation and hybrid beings and the images of people with animal heads or bodies led me to think about more series issues of xenotransplantation; splicing to make actual hybrid creatures and plants (the mule, the grapefruit); vivisection; and post-humanism. Therefore I made my miniature characters based on what I read – from folk- and fairy- tales, history, my imagined fairy tales and imagined posthuman, hybrid creatures. I thought about each character as I was making it, what story it might have. Although some of the characters are repeated (especially the octopus-headed people), each figurine is made by hand, and thus unique.

During this process, I happened to meet an historian who researched the “philosophers’ walnuts” in China. She shared that this practice came from the Literati who collected pairs of walnuts to roll in the hands while the men contemplated life. These paired walnuts became family heirlooms, passed dowmkp-n from generation to generation. The reverence of the walnuts and the practice of collecting them has made a come-back in recent years. Walnut brokers buy unpeeled walnuts from growers without seeing the actual shells, sizes, or colors and collectors bid on them (hoping for a matched pair) also without actually seeing the walnuts.  I found this intriguing.

I also continued to research walnuts around the world and found that the other reason they were popular in China is that the walnut meat resembled a brain and were considered good for brain stimulation/intelligence.

The intersection of the magic, Literati, brain-food, and medicinal application coupled with individual characters from stories placed in my version of the German ornament are created from materials or objects with no real economic value. In this piece, I used walnuts, fake gold-leaf, nail polish, poster paint, plastic toys, children’s colored foam clay, and a hot-glue gun. The transformation of these cheap materials into something of perceived value.