Carnal Portal Doors

Carnal Portal Doors is a woodcut formed of two plates which will also become the two doors of a three plate print. I have designed the doors in such a way that they can form a composition on their own. When the middle plate is finished, it can be added to form a new composition made up of three plates, that looks like a wooden altar. I finished this two-plate version of the doors to be exhibited at the A Matter Of. stand in the Other Art Fair 24-27 April 2014, which we funded via kickstarter.

The two scrolls at the top read 'Creatio' and 'Sacrificium', creation and sacrifice in Latin. These are titles to each door, the two sides of life/death, and also the two sides of the reproductive cycle: birth and menstruation. The circle at the top, in the middle, represents a uterus with its vaginal opening, from which a skull and a baby come out symbolising these two religious themes in correlation to the female cycle.

On the left God, the Supreme Anatomist extracts Eve from the side of Adam, 'And He opened the flesh'. On the right, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac: 'Take thy only begotten son/ Isaac/ and offer hin in sacrifice/ I will bless thy seed'. The quotes on this print are inspired by the Bible.

Carnal Portal Doors measures 50x82cm, and the altar will measure 100x82cm. The image below shows the three plates, before any of them had been carved.

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.

Performance at the Private view of Salon Hysterique: Gabriella Daris and Diana Pornoterrorista

During the private view of the exhibition La Petit Mort et la Grand Hysterie on Tuesday 21st January 2014 I saw the performance Cadaver Exquis: A Parlour Game, a collaboration between Gabriella Daris and Diana Pornoterrorista. What follows is Gabriella Daris' text on the piece.

CADAVRE EXQUIS: A PARLOUR GAME: LE SPECTACLE

A parlour game played with the cut-up technique - an exquisite corpse between the White Swan/Odette/Juliette and the Black Swan/Odile/Justine. Under the veil, the corpus is stimulated by ways of poetic imagination and body memory recollection, through the operation from concealment to revelation to concealment till they reach, the end. Do you think it is easy to get rid of a wound, to shut the mouth of a wound?[© Text copyright: Gabriella Daris, 2013]

LES POETS CORPOREL | LES SALONINNIERES

White Swan/Odette/Juliette: Gabriella DarisBlack Swan/Odile/Justine: Diana Pornoterrorista

The performance involved two figures dressed in a black and a white burkha, representing a duality like white/black swan personifications, they will later reveal that they are naked underneath the garments, wearing white feathers around her long neck-Gabriella Daris- and a black feather mask, almost like a beard, surrounding her mouth-Diana Pornoterrorista.

The piece commences with Daris sitting, and the audience is asked by 'Odette' to cut pieces from her white burkah, with a pair of scissors, revisiting Yoko Ono's 1964 Cut Piece. We are asked to write on the white piece of fabric something that, based on our personal experience, is a prison for us. After a long time, when 'Odile' has barely any fabric covering her, Diana asks a member of the public to read out a text, while she collects the written bits of fabric from the audience, showing them to us, one by one, stapling them onto her flesh with a staple gun. From what I can recall, the text is a criticism to Western perspectives on the burkah, encouraging to turn 'our' (Western) critical (and prejudist) view onto our own issues, to stop criticising other cultures to look at our own, and the way in which we classify and label people to perpetuate forms of oppression.

The text is reflected in most of the words on the fabric, which have come to represent 'prisons' for their bearers, recalling a lot of insults and labels. Once the black swan is semi-covered once more by the shameful words, the white swan helps her take them off, one by one, and they are swallowed between the black feathered mouth, devoured, like an aggressive vengeful act. Each word is shown to the audience at a time before disappearing inside her mouth, and when Odile/Diana comes across one in particular, 'capitalism', she turns around and puts it up her ass, literally-in a physical metaphor.

The two characters, the white and the black burkahs, swans, with their emphasis on being a pair and somehow opposites and complementary, speaks to me of the way difference is constructed in society, in opposing pairs: female/male, homosexuality/heterosexuality, healthy/pathological, fat/thin, able/disable, black/white, strong/weak, self/other...etc. During the performance, the two artists don't function as opposites, but more as a pair working towards the same goal, revealing the body, covering it with the words-prisons- of many others, in a ritual where they are finally devoured and consumed.

Beyond, or underneath, the burkah, their nude female bodies are diverse, Diana's 'femenine' curves defied by her embodied rejection of gender stereotypes (in general in her practice as an artist), Gabriella's shows the signs of discipline and training from her formation as a classical dancer. Notions of active/passive are also explored, the two women shifting positions, Gabriella receiving the audiences cuts, cuts that become empowered in the transformation from cuts to words and from words to Diana's affirming action of self-stapling.

These are two bodies that have obvious presence in the work, from the moment they come to view and in the actions revolve around them: covering and revealing of them, cutting closely around, stapling on. The appearance of the wound in Gabriella's text, together with the concept of prison, as understood by the diversity of the personal audience's experiences, makes use of the burkah as a metaphor for the skin-as-prison, the site to reclaim the flesh in affirmative action, to define as individuals in all our diversity what it means. Perhaps the skin is the Westerner's (not only female) prison, far more subtle and engrained than any garment. Can wounds function beyond signs of abuse? Self-inflicted in affirmative creative action they defy passive/active assumptions of cutter and receiver, inflictor and victim. 

The wound is a core concept in my practice, as can be seen on two of the prints I contributed to the show, The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina and Incredulity. These together with the work of many other artists, Lizzie Learman amongst them, is still on show until the 19th April, at Blacks, 67 Dean Street, W1D 4QH London.

 The Anatomy of the Hidden Vagina and Incredulity.

 

Lizzie Learman's Trouble and Strife



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.

 

 

 

 

Susan Aldworth: Printmaking and Anatomy in the search for Self

Susan Aldworth's work is currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery, until the 1st of September 2013. I am interested in her work because she works primarily with printmaking processes, the 3 pieces on show being portraits consisting of 9 monotypes; and with medical imagery, in this case with historical and modern scans of the human body. The sitters are people with epilepsy, a condition that links with the artists' search for ways to visualise the self. She has worked before with people with Alzheimer and Schizophrenia, and her current practice focuses on the gap between the physical materiality of the brain, and the interior sense of subjectivity.

My favourite piece is Elizabeth, 2012, whom Susan portrayed with an image of her face located in her lower abdomen, due to the woman's deep concerns about having a baby. A very interesting move, changing the commonly accepted seat of identity from the brain to the uterus. Elizabeth refused to take the drugs that controlled her epileptic attacks due to their impact on pregnancy, and with this risked her life. One could say thus, that her strong yearning for being a mother is effectively reflected in the portrait, where her face, her identity, lies within her womb.

I attended In Conversation: The Portrait Anatomised, on the 6th of June 2013, where a neuropsychologist, the artist, and Max (one of the sitters) came together. Most of the conversation turned around the difficulties of grasping the self, and the gap between the physical brain and consciousness. Susan's use of medical imagery is a turn in comparison to the tradition of portraiture hosted at the gallery, medicine portrays the inside in a literal and 'truthful' way. Furthermore, medical imaging captures a fragment and perhaps depicts a more suiting vision of a changing, fractured and elusive self? In comparison to traditional portraiture that seems to idealise subjectivity, elevating it to the status of 'essence', immutable and immortalized in the process of representation, almost assuming the existence of the soul.

I described medical images as 'truthful' because I think this notion of verisimilitude is problematic, the self is something we have a sense of, but that by definition cannot be seen, therefore what we see in medical images is not it, but it's as close as we can get to having a visual token of what it's like, where it inhabits. Following scientific discourse, we are not used to believing in things that we cannot see, we deem they do not exist, thinking that the other alternative, the soul, lies in the realm of religion. However, just because science cannot provide us an image of it, it does not mean the self does not exist, and it does not mean it is necessarily the soul.

We exist in the minds of others that know us (who know more of, or differently, about us than we do), and our unconscious also exists, the even more elusive version of our subjectivity. We are too used to equating seeing with believing, to equating what we think with what we are, and to looking for the truth by removing the skin, as if it stood for the fake appearance concealing the ultimate reality. We learned the story of the Incredulity of St Thomas all too well, and forgot it was a story.

 The Incredulity of St Thomas, Caravaggio.

 

 

These are two lithographs from 2012 by Susan Aldworth, were she explores anatomically unorthodox representations of the body:

 

 Nature Nurture 2

 

 Reassembling the Self 4

 

 

Also on show now is Transience, a solo exhibition of Susan Alworth's work at the GV art Gallery, which I am looking forward to visiting.

Anatomical Wax Works

Eleanor Crook is a wax model artist that has done work for medical museums such as the Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Royal College of Surgeons, has a background in sculpture and fine art (Central Saint Martins and Royal Academy) and whose practice bridges art and science, using the fascinating technique of wax modelling. I would like to show images of a recent piece titled Death Seals Our Long Work of Thoughts, and a video in which we can see her working on a pathological model:

(Two images above) Death Seals Our Long Work of Thoughts, Eleanor Crook, 2013

 

 

 

 

She's quite unique in her specialisation, involvement with museums, as well as producing work of what would fall under an artistic nature. I find it very interesting how the materials and technique she has chosen to master, have beautifully inscribed her in the history of anatomical model making, linking her work to La Specola's museum specimens, for instance, the classic 18th century Italian models, which she even mentions in the video as an important influence.

 

And how a technique -wax modelling- having it's own cultural history, connotations, particular aesthetic and technical nature, can be further developed by a contemporary artist, employing this charged language to produce works that are relevant today, yet acknowledge our cultural history.

 

I guess this is how I feel about printmaking too, possessing intrinsic meaning, that I strive to discover and unleash, finding a logical and creative marriage between form and content.

 

Prosopology of the Dead, Eleanor Crook.

 

 

Prosopology of Death, is another piece by Eleanor Crook refering to death, and what I find so successful is the fact that the technique speaks of death too, so she uses this language to her advantage in shaping her ideas. Wax refers to death in many ways, from the anatomical models of disease, to it's use in death masks, and it's physical similarity to skin, which has made it a preferred material for realistic life-like representations of the body throughout history-which inevitably remind us of corpses. Following this trail of thought, go to an earlier post I did on wax. 

 







Tattooed Saints and Religious Anatomies

I absolutely revere Ramon Maiden's work, an artist from Barcelona; the more I see the more connections I find with my own art and interests.

I came across his work at a tattoo parlour in East London, his religious figures. Then I saw his references to anatomy, and his work on wooden hands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tattoos, anatomy and religion, what a great mix. I like his emphasis on the wounds of martyrs, and the treatment he gives to skin, engraving representation on top of representation, creating layers of iconography on top of the body. There is the 'real' body, the image of the body, and Ramon Maiden embellishing a further layer of meaning. The reference to anatomy is very effective as the skin serves as a great metaphor for the process of representation, as if this was the 'image' we present of our true selves (our insides). A socially acceptable, gendered, hermetic, leather vessel that contains and conceals what we 'really' are: a mess of fat, blood and guts.

Mechanical Organisms

I went to see the finalists for the Place Prize for Dance, on the 26th of April, a show where a great selection of contemporary dance pieces come together. My favourite piece was Riccardo Buscarini's Athletes, which I later found out won the first prize.

I scribbled some words and thoughts it provoked:

Mechanical bio-robotic creatures, cold-blooded reptiles, depending on each other for survival. Outer space ecosystem. Survival of the fittest. Nature's inevitable cruelty. Macro and microcosm: outerspace and microscopic level. Killing in the animal kingdom, eating, reproduction and death, function and instinct. Interaction, interdependence. Praying Mantis. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sound in space. Silence. Nature's cycle of destruction.

The pristine white suits the dancers were wearing, had an external spinal cord structure attached on their back, which gave another layer of associations to the piece: covering the bodies perfectly, hygienically sealed, unstained, the bones outstanding interlocking parts of a greater mechanism. This emphasised the idea of interconnected parts as the dancers smoothly slid around each other as a lubricated biological machine. Or perhaps as inner components of the inside body, like individual cells that live, eat, reproduce and die.

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.

Exposed: Anatomical Tattoo

Love this image of an anatomical tattoo where whats under the skin is represented on its surface... its from Some Quality Meat.

Tarot Tattoo

Lately I have been looking at alot of tattoos and I came across this one. I like the proximity to the hands which I associate to card reading and even palmistry. A great site for good quality amazing tattoos is Some Quality Meat.

Layers of Skin

When I saw this ad for Dermablend, featuring 'zombie boy', it reminded me of the type of performance work I do, specially when he rubs out his fake skin starting with a hole in the middle of his chest...

Very inspiring.

Fantastic Voyage: Mapping and Discovering the Insides

 The Man of Commerce, 1889. Compares human anatomy with the American transportation system, from Strange Maps.


This talk at the Wellcome Collection was part of Cold Ensembles' Anatomy Season, and it explored the links between travelling, journeys, mapping and visualising the inside of the body. The speakers were Anatomy Professor Susan Stranding, Visual Culture Lecturer Marius Kwint and Linguist Dr Laura Wright, and the talk was chaired by Daniel Glaser from the Wellcome.

Stranding's presentation was a journey through the history of anatomy, emphasising the change in methods of representation with evolving technology, and the unprecedented possibility of looking inside the live body, as opposed to models based on the use of cadavers.

In my view, MIR scans imply a radical change in the cultural meanings attached to medical images, no longer associating them to death, no longer implicitly violent, no longer passive flesh subjected to a penetrating gaze.

Although the viewing of the inside no longer implies violence, it does not breach the alienating distance between doctor and patient, but potentially increases it. Robotic assistants can be used to perform simple procedures, and doctors can operate long-distance. From medieval operations where the doctor instructed to the butcher-surgeon without dirtying his hands until today, the health practitioner remains at a very clearly marked distant position to the patient, dealing with an inanimate nameless body, not the person.

It was really interesting to hear the comment from a medical student in the crowd, regarding her relationship to her assigned corpse for the duration of the course, and how there was a need to refrain from giving it a name and not think about the life of the person, to be able to do "horrible things to it". The fact that Western medicine is highly reliant on cutting the body open to treat it, attaches a horrific side to the body under the skin, that inside that we only know through implicit violence.

This horror of the insides becomes repressed under skin with procedures that prevent our eye from enduring it. It is the case of modern Minimally Invasive Surgery where small incisions allow the insertion of miniaturised surgical instruments into a body cavity or structure. It seems that we might be moving from the open cut procedures derived from dissection practices, to new ways of making surgery that do not relly on the cut.

Stranding ended her talk with Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) where natural orifices, like the mouth, the vaginal opening and the anus, are employed as access routes into the body for surgery. This was specially pertaining to my work, one could say the vagina not only precedes but also finally outlives the surgical cut.

Marius Kwint exposed how ways of representing and experiencing landscapes through travel permeate to anatomy, giving rise to the ideas of 'a journey of discovery', a quest with scientific mission, being associated to the world beyond the dermis. The revealing of hidden mysteries also fits, as the aim to elucidate the secrets of generation motivated early dissectors to access the uterus (K. Park).
Not only is it about discovering and conquering unknown territory to man, but also to exercise authority and display one's conquest, or possessed and tamed virginal wild land (female sexuality). Spectacle played an important role in operating theatres and anatomical models, utterly exemplified in Gunter von Hagen's Body Worlds touring anatomical cabinet of curiosities.   
Following the idea that an anatomical illustration is like a map of the interior landscape, I did a collage merging an anatomical drawing of the legs with relief countours, other map references and word-labels (below) illustrating the association between notions of place, direction and orientation with personal experiences (memory, emotions, life choices) and life as a path. This was part of a series called Embody for a commission proposal.

Where My Legs Take Me

Latex Mask Surgery

The patient, Ramon Eding, arrived on the agreed day of his appointment, bringing with him traces of an old face. The two in-house surgical artists Paul Wye and myself attended his requirements, to reconstruct a new full head second skin using latex. There where some issues affecting the comfortability of the patient, regarding impaired vision, breathing problems and breathing ammonia, which prevented the completion of the surgery around the facial region. The nursing post operatory period was brief and the results satisfactory.

This intensive mask making day was fun and gave me some ideas about using latex as second skin for the head, and other body parts, perhaps even full body. The texture of this material, it's flexibility and the mat finish with talcum powder, resembles human skin very closely.