Show me yours... I'll show you mine

Show me yours, I'll show you mine is an ongoing series of pairs of small etching plates. They represent encounters between two people facing each other, it's about looking and being looked at. It is inspired by psychoanalytical views on childhood understandings of sexual difference, early anatomical illustrations and Christian iconography. And also Lacan's mirror stage. With sexual and religious undertones, this series compares looking at oneself in the mirror to looking at another and the process by which looking and difference can shape the way we make sense of ourselves and our bodies.

Show me yours, I'll show you mine has been selected to take part in the Internarioal Miniprint exhibition in September in Cadaques, Spain.

CARNAL PORTAL DOORS

 

Recently finished this wooden triptych, composed of three cedar plates, two doors and a central piece. The doors can be printed together to form another print (below). The doors I had finished a while back, and now with the centre it is complete. I feel like my style has evolved, so that the middle plate feels a little different but still relates to the iconography on the door panels. The religious reference on the sides is much heavier and direct, with quotes alluding to the bible, and the stories of the birth of Eve and the sacrifice of Isaac. Whilst the centre is perhaps more ambiguous. The kneeling figures are facing and connected to the 'carnal aperture'- is this an apparition, an abstract symbol or rooted in concrete reality? They have a bodily connection with it, of what nature?

Drawing from yet departing from Christian iconography, these figures could represent Adam and Eve. The duality often leads to this assumption, but their sexual characteristics are ambiguous, and is there something flowing out or into their bodies? Their opening lies where their belly buttons would be, is it some form of genitalia?

Lubos Plny

Absolutely love this artist, thanks Paul for directing me to their work. There's a very interesting biography about him here. It says that he has always been fascinated with graphic art and anatomy, and that the pregnancy of his partner and their son's birth greatly influenced his work.

I find the overlapping of anatomical drawings with (hetero) sexuality and reproduction unique and very inspiring. Specially in terms of drawing boundaries between self and others.

Sorry I don't have titles or dates for these, they are taken from Abcd Art Brut website, an organisation aimed at raising awareness and diffusing Art Brut in France and beyond.

Aleksandra Waliszewska

Waliszewska is an extremely prolific Polish artist who's work I love, this is a selection of pieces were she explores the wound, or the access to the insides of the body, a recurrent theme in her work. She works with gouache, and takes inspiration from things as sparse as Memling, Poussin, Jan Ziarnko, Enguerrand Quarton, Hans Memling, Japanese horror movies and British skinhead attire of the 70's.

This is only a small sample of her work, other recurrent characters, themes and places in her work are threatening woods, human-eating animals, the uncanny, fairy-tales, violence, stories and myths.

Sources: all images from the artist's tumblr page, Maurizio Cattelan's interview in her blog, Diego Gerlach's interview for 'my dance the skull'.

La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie

 

 

 

 

I will be exhibiting some of my prints at La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie, a fascinating curatorial project by Gabriella Daris, that is composed of the exhibition, a duet performance, and the launch of Hysteria feminist magazine. I am thrilled to take part! The group show will be open from the 22nd January to the 19th April, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 1pm, in Blacks, 76 Dean Street, W1D 4QH.

 

Amongst my work in the exhibition you will be able to find The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina (pictured above), and will also find darkly humorous pieces by Lizzie Learman, and works by emerging and established artists including Annie Sprinkle and ORLAN.

 

 

 

 

Transubstantiation: Performance on Paper

 

My second performance at Camberwell College of Arts, was at the Printmaking Workshop, and was titled Transubstantiation: Performance on Paper, performed on Thursday 14th April 2011. My intention was to draw a link between the printmaking process, tools, clothes and actions, with surgery; drawing a parallel between the paper and my body. The following photographs where taken with my old film camera, in collaboration with Ramon Eding, a great artist and friend, with whom it was so nice to work with (Thank you so much for these amazing pictures). I re-enacted and staged the performance again to take these.

In this performance I represent different figures, I was woman, printmaker, surgeon, mother and priest. There is one more figure, which I call The Cutter, is she who cuts herself, and lies between the woman, witch and body-artist. A defying and transgressive character that is all body, embodies everything red, accesses the forbidden insides, breaks the skin, sheds blood, is the menstruation, pain, birth, sacrifice and both destruction and creation.

The following print is the final result of the actions performed on the paper. The embossed host plate, the red baptism, the kiss, the cuts, the wound plates, the uterus and baby plates.

Empress Stah in Space

Another mind-blowing performance in the SPILL festival, where Empress Stah, dressed with intergalactic second skin clothes (or none at all) contorts gracefully her body across the stage, blow-up stars below. Great acrobatics. The control she has over her body movements, despite the massive heels, of every part of her body, including her powerful gripping vagina muscles.

Her costumes, helmet, masks, heels, light devices are amazing. The slight clumsiness and awkardness of a robotic pokemon-power ranger on heels is overcomed by her pristine, decisive moves, and her authenticity. Everything is part of the Stah outerworld.

The peak of the piece was her use of her vaginal orifice creatively in the performance. Her white suit had a small red-pink opening, like a belly button made of cloth, which drew our atenttion to her parts, as she spread her legs and bended her body into forms. It was later revealed infront of our bewildered eyes that this gave access to her powerful vaginal muscles, which she used to hold a pen-like device to write onto a touch-screen, and later on, to hold a torch that shot a striking red beam of light which shone through a smoke filled stage, combining her twists and turns with a beautiful light show!

Empress Stah is an Aerial artist and neo-cabaret performer, this performance is "part of an ongoing project with a long-term ambition; to create a performance in outer space (...) Set on the plane of immanence, the show's concepts have been transcribed through trance and writing sessions between Empress Stah and seminal artist Ron Athey, which took place at Bentwaters in Suffolk, the site of the biggest purpoted UFO/Military incident in Europe." (SPILL 2013 catalog)

Jamie Lewis Hadley's Analogue to a Blunt Trauma

The fisrt piece I saw from SPILL festival of performance this year, was Jamie Lewis Hadley's Analogue to a blunt trauma, where the central theme, in my view, was the medical and violent connotations of the substance of blood. Carrying a golden gun, dressed with black boots and fingerless leather gloves, a man walks into the space, a white dimly lit room with a sofa. He lies there, and a woman walks in with a medical suitcase, dressed as a professional, yet not exactly like a doctor. She takes different devices out of her case and checks his blood pressure, to then begin a blood extraction. Soft spoken, she checks how he's feeling, though we can't hear the exact words, they have small chat, exchange a few smiles. The bag rests on the floor beside them, slowly filling up with the warm liquid from inside him.

Once it's full, the doctor walks behind the sofa, further back into the room, and proceeds to hang it from two wires, so it stands at eye level, suspended. She leaves.

The golden gun is resting before the sofa, to one side, it has been since he placed it there before he lied down. It seems a reminder of who he is, like a broken soldier whose wounds are being taken care of. He soon stands up and another man enters the space to hand him a new gun, this one is black and real; aiming at his own hung blood, he shoots.

Like shooting oneself, only through a medical device that isolates that living tissue, packaged, held together by plastic. This valuable liquid donated, sacrificed, in a literal way. Seems to have as little sense as men fighting and pouring each other's blood for whatever the reasons. Is it part of the initiation ritual of manhood? Get a gun, shed some blood, then you gain a certain status, matching with the boots and the leather gloves.

Jamie Lewis Hadley, former professional wrestler, is a solo live art performer that explores blood, deterioration, pain and violence. He is currently concerned with performing medicine and the history of bloodletting.

Jamie explains that his use of blood "comes from a frustration that I am unable to donate blood because I have had sex with a man ‘in the last 12 months’. Secondly, I believe a wider audience can engage with performance work that uses blood when medical equipment and professionals are used to extract and exhibit the blood." He also hopes that the topical use of a live firearm in the piece will highlight and raise questions around this current social and political issue. (Attitude.co.uk)

The Birth of Christ

This is my first linocut, a small image of the Virgin Mary giving birth to Christ. I made it over the Christmas and used it as a Christmas card, after all this event is precisely what the celebration is all about, despite the lack of this kind of representations. The dove and the eye represent God and the holly spirit, which converge in the uterus, 'making' Jesus.

It is an edition of a 100, image size 10 x 15cm, printed with dark red and gold.

Vagina Shrine

How amazing is that?! A vagina-shaped shrine in some remote Spanish town, named Olmeda de Cobeta, in Guadalajara. Thank you Blanca Quintas for this reference her uncle gave her, which reminded them of my work! Absolutely love it.

With the little female figure, the virgin Mary of course, peeping out of the opening among some flowers. Interesting how the vagina-shaped hollow and herself come together in this wonderful coincidence when she is the one who birthed Jesus through immaculate conception, a very particular vagina in deed...