Exploring Gendered Materials

A Pile of Stones

Lino Cut Prints

I have been inspired by the spirituality of Poland, or more perhaps the sense of the importance of commemorating the past, embracing memory and physicalising those memories somehow; through candles, flowers, or in the Jewish tradition, placing a stone by the grave or memorial of that which you wish to commemorate. So I decided to create free-thought prints to make into a book, something to take away from my year in Krakow and to build on, on my return. By free-thought I mean just random images that have come to me whilst being here and about being here, thinking about my practice or patterns, objects and issues that I recognise here, and also things that I have no idea where they come from. Its a freeing process because I don't have to think about these prints being conceptual or having some kind of deeper meaning. They are just thoughts, I suppose like a visual journal, but I like to think of it as a memorial; a compilation or catalogue of memory and thought.

The Book

(Quote from Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer)

Litografia
My first attempt at lithography...

A woman’s hair is the gateway to her sensuality..?

The Body Immemorial

My films and photographs using these distinctively Polish grave candles led me to thinking about what they represent, what they stand in place of. I was trying to identify that invisible something in these offerings to a memory, a person, an event. But really they do not represent something that is present but invisible, they act as a physical sign for something that can no longer be physical. Essentially a physical body. They re-physicalise the deceased body, allow it to have a physical presence and to be remembered. Like a grave stone. And this is what I have started to consider as a part of my painting workshop, largely through the combination of the body and wax.

Immemorial: To extend of exist beyond the reach of memory.

Reconstructed

Gender, Materials, Femininity, Sensuality, Hair, Beauty, Decoration, Domesticity, Duty, Tradition, Desire, Past, Present, Future, Body, Being...

Deconstructed

'Resplendent'

'Hanging and Unmoveable'

'Tied and Look down'

'Web'

Hidden Signs

'Cornered Cross Shadow'

'Barred Window'

Gendered Materials

'Trident'

'Pierced'

'Separate and the Same'

'Faintly Sprung and Starkly There'

Light Through Lino

Partytury Graficzne

Inspired by Alina Szapocznikow

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/28/arts/alin190.jpg

The delicious joys of the mouth! But also, alas, the curse of having a mouth! Filled with the bitter taste of memories one chokes on; a melancholy mouth that neither swallows nor spits things out but continues chewing, dismembering the remembered, in a ceasless grinding motion of the teeth. Imagine a mouth that was both one of infinte joys and of endless mourning. I say this is the mouth of Alina Szapocznikow.

Jan Verwoert

Since I first encountered the work of Alina Szapocznikow at an exhibition in Leeds I have wanted to explore the ideas of sensuality and memory through the mouth. And Szapocznikow's use of chewing gum is so sculptural and abstractly, surprisingly beautiful that to emulate it seemed the only logical path. That she was Polish and that I would soon be living in Poland was a complete coincidence, but as with Szapocznikow it has been the history of Poland that has dictated the form and feel of this work. It is not really about sensuality, but it is about memory, and memories connection to something previously physical, now not only invisible but non-existent.

I had never before encountered the Jewish custom of placing stones on graves and memorials to commemorate the Dead. I don't know whether it is because of the Holocaust and therefore the greater sigificance behind these memorials, or because of the simplicity but sincerity of the act, but it is something that always makes me feel incredibly reflective. I also don't know whether the way I discovered this custom matters, although it does seem to cheapen it, but my experience of it has chiefly come through tour guides and trips. But perhaps I would not have discovered it at all if it were not for my seemingly 'very touristy' trips to synagogues, war memorials, or to Auschwitz. It is also regrettable to me to think that the place I have learnt most about Jewish culture, Krakow, is a place where now the Jewish population numbers around 100 registered Jews.

My aim with this work with chewing gum was essentially to create a memorial pile of stones, but for the stones to more visually represent the bodies that the stones really stand for. Perhaps sensually, in that there is a direct physical connection to the body, perhaps even traces of saliva, imprints from the teeth, the tongue, the gums. Gum as a material is also more like flesh; it is soft and susceptible to its environment and to the workings of humans, to wounds, to scars, to imprint and impression.

The idea of a pile of stones as really being a pile of bodies brings up images of the Holocaust, which I think is perhaps why the stones piled on and around memorials to the Holocaust and to the victims of WWII seem such a tragically fitting acknowledgement of the past.

These photos are of the work in progress.