Dowsing, divining, searching for elements that may be in front of us - or underfoot. To search for an element that cannot be located through sight but felt within the body. My art practice is an embodied experience of searching, it questions how desires propel our every step.
(scroll down to see entire series)
Image Credit: L'Inconnue de la Seine (plaster death mask) (b/w photo), French School, (19th century) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library
multiple attempts
To consider that our intentions, our desires, manifesting in material and form.
Thin threads are warped and weft into a network - a fragile structure of fabric. Starch stiffens the woven threads offering structure and form. I sew the gauze together, only to pull it apart again, it becomes a way to undo and redo one’s self. The sewn ladders could never support my weight. Yet the act of threading and unweaving reorders my thoughts and pulls them apart again. The mundane meets the dream world. Only to fantasize my material self elsewhere. The ladders are reassembled into different configurations and offer new pathways for cognitive travel and desires.
The print installation pull my insides out is comprised of thirty - five prints. Each image is a bleed print on a two foot square format. Drypoint, stone lithography and mixed media are the techniques used to develop this series. In the installation the prints lining the walls of the gallery hang at varying heights. The works are grouped in an erratic manner, with sets of prints of three, four, five to six.
The prints of the installation pull my insides out represent a thinking in images, a way to stabilize in manageable units the constant flux of sense, pulses and drives that surge through my body. The morphing of the spine with a flower and the intestines with a tail are metaphorical relations that push aside biological functions posing the body in a poetic realm. In this new invention of self,
I am not constantly aware of how my body systematically functions to stay alive. Instead it is the triggers of sensations that resonate: the thoughts that lock my throat; the anticipation that palpitates my heart; and the instinctual hesitations that knot my gut. These are the sensorial intimacies which I try to represent on paper.
Breathing is a vital function of the body, a sustaining life force that all other functions depend on. These drawings entitled the respiration series, explore different affects of breathing. Through the respiration systems the body pulls in air to oxygenate our blood and with each inhalation there is a renewal of
body and with each exhalation we colour the air around us. The sounding breath of our voice has a visceral impact which resonates throughout the body. Each drawing in this series is comprised of appropriated material. I have redrawn, reconfigured found images from art, anatomy and botanical textbooks;
A line drawing of a lily becomes a delicate megaphone. A cosmos flower poses as whimsical propeller giving flight to a trachea. A set of lungs grow a large leafy plant. These visual metaphors explore the sensorial affects of breathing, breath and voice.
The sound installation murmur is delivered in quadraphonic ‘surround sound’, one speaker in each of the four corners of the gallery. Emitting from the speakers are vocal sounds of moans, breaths, sighs, chokes, gasps, murmurs, chortles, babbles, hisses, hums, puffs and drones. Only a few recognizable words are sputtered amidst the sighs and groans. The composition of the piece fluctuates between one voice and many layers of the same voice. There is a spatial
element achieved through the quadraphonic sound. The voice travels around the periphery of the room and through the centre of the room. A breath begins in one speaker and is exhausted in another. The piece has a disjointed layout of emotions butted up against one another: an orgasmic sound pushes to anger; a relieved tone becomes gasps of suffocation; laughter ends in sobs. This sound piece amplifies the sighs, moans and chortles that are often suppressed in
speech. By dissecting verbal language and pushing aside intelligible words I expose the underlining current of bodily sensations, transmitted in between and beneath words. In this project I am striving to magnify guttural utterances and to observe what occurs at the threshold where language both disintegrates and begins.
