Topophilia

This article was published in French and English in the Revue Profane n°7, to get it for you, it is here.

Unassuming objects from the realm of folk art and destined to become toys, the spinning tops which artist Nadia Pasquer collects have become part of a broader research that highlights the invisible connections between the objects in her collection and those she creates.

Enthusiast have their own lexical field

Words: Graziella Semerciyan, Translator: Aisling Halleman

Photos: Audrey Corregan

Set design: Claude Néron

Nadia Pasquer’s spinning top collection is the result of a hoarding process with neither beginning nor end. Reflecting the artistic research she has undertaken over the last twenty years or so through shapes derived initially from the lingam¹, including tops and polyhedrons in smoke-fired clay. She cannot recollect precisely which was her first top. Certainly a gift, a friendly gesture. Over the years, she received others as presents, and found some too. Without especially looking for them, without investing the effort of a collector to reach completeness or out of passion for rare models. “ I like unbalanced shapes, settled and then set in motion ” she says. Nadia Pasquer prefers traditional wooden tops, that are usually turned.

There are tops whose movement is launched by fingertips or those that require an ample movement of both hands when the handle is too long; there are dice spinning tops whose momentum is triggered by a string, but the most modern ones have not yet been included in her collection. Actually, what is amusing, is that Nadia Pasquer doesn’t feel like a collector; but, through an analogy of shape and balance, she reveals that she has also collected plumb lines and pendulums as well as compasses whose spontaneous spinning she enjoys.

Nadia Pasquer’s spinning top collection is the result of a hoarding process with neither beginning nor end. Reflecting the artistic research she has undertaken over the last twenty years or so through shapes derived initially from the lingam1, including tops and polyhedrons in smoke-fired clay. She cannot recollect precisely which was her first top. Certainly a gift, a friendly gesture.

Over the years, she received others as presents, and found some too. Without especially looking for them, without investing the effort of a collector to reach completeness or out of passion for rare models. “ I like unbalanced shapes, settled and then set in motion ”, she says. Nadia Pasquer prefers traditional wooden tops, that are usually turned. There are tops whose movement is launched by fingertips or those that require an ample movement of both hands when the handle is too long; there are dice spinning tops whose momentum is triggered by a string, but the most modern ones have not yet been included in her collection. Actually, what is amusing, is that Nadia Pasquer doesn’t feel like a collector; but, through an analogy of shape and balance, she reveals that she has also collected plumb lines and pendulums as well as compasses whose spontaneous spinning she enjoys.

As a matter of fact, are we in the presence of a collection of tops or is the purpose of this collection more conceptual than material? “ When a top turns, it seeks balance, then, after a quivering, it ends its spin and the moment before it collapses, it spins again countercurrent. ” All the forms of balance are set in motion by the smoke-fired forms which Nadia Pasquer creates, each shape is self-sufficient and forms a constellation of connections with the others. It is precisely the cosmos and the movement of planets that this collection of tops reminds Nadia of. The top, like the potter’s wheel, confronts the clay-shape in motion with the clay-matter. When they stand in front of their wheels, potters attempt to center, which makes them “ rooted beings who naturally renew with the truth of their matter, their clay; beings who also know the properties of the kiln where the spirit prevails ” ²

¹ A standing stone, often phallic-like, representing Shiva.

² Introduction by Mathilde Scalbert-Bellaigue and Berna- dette Lhôte-Sulmont to the French edition of A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, published by Dessain et Tolra, 1973.