[-empyre-] Feminist Data Visualization Post

[Erin Leland]

I would like to introduce a body of research I have been working on in
dialogue with a deceased sculptor, Thomas McGlynn, in response to the
feminist call “to locate data visualization in concrete bodies and
geographies” as quoted by Catherine d'Ignazio. Thomas McGlynn was a
liturgical sculptor whose most well-known sculpture was of Our Lady of
Fatima, sculpted under the guidance of Lucy, a nun who witnessed a
reappearing apparition in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. McGlynn's original
sculpture was based on his own imagination of the appearance of the angel,
but as soon as he gained permission to see Lucy, McGlynn realized that he
needed to completely remake the statue into Lucy's remembered vision. Thus,
the sculptor became a conduit for a female witness. Lucy even touched the
clay herself, molding the figurine into her exact recollection.
Today, a Reverend named Father Richard McAlister takes care of McGlynn's
sculpture archives on the campus of Providence College, and has recreated
the sculptor's Italian apartment in exact replica up to one half inch of
the original. McGlynn's original furniture and belongings are intermingled
with the belongings of Father Richard McAlister. Stored in drawers and
closets, the objects include papers, shoe boxes, a head to a garden hose,
and clothes. The replica apartment room is an object, a container for a
sculptor's body. Its soul is found not so much in the identical fabrication
of its original, but in the contemporary scrap objects incorporated into
its shelves. In turn, the apartment channels Thomas McGlynn's own
sculptural process of transferring Lucy's voice through clay, the figurine
as a molded container for a female voice. It is in the ability to act as a
conduit for another person that the visualization of a voice can take
place.
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