Entropy comes from the Greek entropē: a turning toward, a transformation. When Rudolf Clausius  coined the term in 1865, he borrowed from tropē, “a turning,” to name a process through which  energy changes in its availability, becoming increasingly dispersed and less capable of being put to  work. Entropy has since become synonymous with disorder, decay, ruin, but these associations  obscure something in the word. Nothing necessarily disappears. Matter remains matter; energy  remains energy. What entropy refers to is a change in its arrangement, and with it the possibility of  return. A glass shatters and remains entirely present in its fragments, yet no amount of reversing the  gesture that broke it will gather those fragments back into a glass. Entropy gives transformation a  direction. It doesn’t just describe the fact that things change, but the accumulation of change into  history: the moment at which a previous arrangement becomes irretrievable. Before disorder, then,  there is the turn—something becoming otherwise, carrying the evidence of what it was without any  promise that it might become so again. 

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Jemima and I are talking over a birthday lunch, sitting next to each other and discussing this word  and how ridiculous it is that it has never come up in relation to her practice before. I’ve previously  in other conversations used the word misbehave to describe how her materiality functions,  something about these materials not performing their duty and in so doing becoming something  else. This may have once been the case, but this word feels too petulant now or something. There is  a neat and useful ambiguity to how entropy functions in art sense, and it also makes me sound  smart. But despite my indulgent introduction, the word entropy actually came to me from a Grimes  song. I was on the bus in high school when I heard Grimes sing the word in a song of the same  name (before her fall from grace a-la Musk). I doubt I looked it up. It lodged itself somewhere in  my head regardless, stored alongside the melody without requiring much comprehension. Music is  good at keeping things for us like that. Hearing the word again years later felt less like learning it  than retrieving it, except this time it seemed to describe something I had been watching happen in  Jemima’s work. Misbehave had located the strangeness in the material, as though steel or liquid  could be disobedient. Entropy relocates it in the system around them. Nothing is behaving badly; it  is simply doing what matter does. Things leak, corrode, circulate, strain, disperse and become  otherwise. The question is what structures we build in the hope that they won’t. Perhaps all  structure does is make change slow enough to look like permanence. There’s something naive in  that hope, I think: the wish to hold something in place despite knowing that contact with it has  already begun to change its arrangement. 

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To drink and drown in pools of ourselves turns on this axis. It got me thinking about desire in  relation to entropy, or more specifically, about desire as another kind of irreversibility. I think about  Robert Smithson’s famous thought experiment: a sandbox divided between black and white sand,  around which a child runs clockwise until the colours mix into grey. Asking the child to run  counter-clockwise does not restore the sand to its previous arrangement; it only mixes it further.  There is no backwards. Anne Carson writes that desire requires something similar: an interval. In  Eros the Bittersweet, desire emerges through the distance between the lover and the beloved,  between what is held and what remains beyond reach. Desire attempts to close this distance while depending upon it for its continued existence. Getting what you want does not return you to the  state you occupied before wanting it. If anything, desire has already interfered with the  arrangement. The sand has been mixed. 

 

Jemima tells me about a scene from Scary Movie 3 in which a woman is impaled during a car crash.  The thing that should kill her somehow misses everything important, and removing it would now  cause her to bleed to death. She survives, but only for as long as the thing remains lodged inside  her. I haven't seen the film, but this is how Jemima tells it to me, which is probably more useful  anyway. Something about desire again. The object of injury becomes the condition of survival;  removing it would not restore the body but injure it again. There is no intact body waiting  underneath. 

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A spike impales the suspended form in To drink and drown in pools of ourselves. From this point  of penetration, something resembling green coolant leaves the sculpture and is carried along storm  drains laid across the gallery floor. Coolant is supposed to preserve a system by taking its excess  heat elsewhere. Here it looks more like the system is bleeding out. Or maybe keeping itself alive.  The distinction becomes difficult to maintain. The spike wounds the body but also gives the liquid  somewhere to go; the drain removes what has escaped while making that escape visible. Like the  woman who cannot be separated from the thing that impales her, the sculpture cannot simply be  returned to some imagined state before penetration. The wound has become structural. Maybe this  is what desire shares with entropy. Not disorder exactly, and definitely not destruction, but the  impossibility of remaining unchanged by contact. To desire something is already to have entered  into relation with it, to allow its presence or absence to reorganise the system around it. Carson’s  lover reaches across the interval toward the beloved, but the interval can never quite be abolished  without also abolishing desire. Something must remain between. Jemima’s sculpture takes this  proposition rather literally: object enters body, body holds object, and what punctures it becomes  inseparable from what keeps it going. Desire does not resolve the distance between two things so  much as give that distance a form. 

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Across the room, the propeller turns. Unlike the punctured body, there is no obvious wound here,  only the steady conversion of one force into another. A propeller is useful precisely because  something passes through it; its function depends on being acted upon, and in turn acting upon  something else. Nothing enters the system without leaving it altered. I keep returning to this in  Jemima’s work: the impossibility of contact without consequence. Even desire, for all its fixation on  the distance between things, is evidence that something has already crossed it. To Drink and Drown  In Pools of Ourselves gives us no untouched state to return to, only matter rearranging itself through  relation. Perhaps this is why the propeller feels less like an image of endless motion than an image  of exchange. It turns because something has passed through it. 

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- Tom Denize