Monday, 21 November 2011
Hunterian Museum of Medical Specimens; sketches and studies. Teeth.
Mandibles. Sketch on Tracing Paper.
Anatomy. Sketchbook Page.
Teeth. Sketch on Tracing paper.
Memento Homo- Quia Pulvis- Sketchbook Page.
Teeth. Print
Skull. Sketch with 5H Pencil.
Img Skulls & Disassembled Mandible. Human Anatomy Book.
Hunterian Museum; Child's Mandible. Sketch 5H Pencil.
Sirens; The Anatomy of Violence
Although the Sirens have represented many things allegorically throughout their history in literature- their symbolic nature is not the only thing that has inspired this work. They represent many things to me on a physical level; they represent beauty and death as being irreversibly intertwined, flesh, blood, bones, and teeth- the physical manifestations of the destruction they wreak, and in antithesis to these things they are emblematic of birds, the delicate fragility of their wings, their elegance of movement, their vulnerability. In my textiles work I propose to concentrate my attentions on this; the juxtaposition of the woman and bird; fury and beauty, flesh and feather.
In considering the violent, visceral nature of the Sirens I have focused my research on what one might call the anatomy of violence; making delicate observations in pencil of antique specimens of teeth, bones, human deformities and body parts in the Hunterian Museum. I also visited slaughterhouses, abattoirs, butchers and the long established Smithfields Meat Market- Photographing meat carcasses and hunks of flesh suspended from meat hooks and translating these photographs into oil paintings and studies. This initial research was heavily influenced by the work of Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; particularly “Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion,” on display in the Tate Modern, and Saville’s “Suspension”.
SEIRENES/EROS/VOLUPTAS
All of art, all of creation is about Death at its core. About acceptance and our rage against inevitability and our confusion and hurt- It is about our lives being defined by something other than their finite end point- not just about what we create to leave behind, but how violently, vibrantly and beautifully we can live.
Sirens; Women with bodies of Birds, "charming perils," "monsters of the sea," in equal measures treacherous, mystifying and seductive, violent and soothing, beautiful and grotesque. The infamous, murderous Bird-Women of Greek Mythology and the subject and overarching metaphor of this work.
Thursday, 8 September 2011
SEIRENES
SEIRENES/EROS/VOLUPTAS
“So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air, and the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer”
Homer. Oddysey. Kamillon. 12.192
“Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption,”
"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never”
1917, Franz Kafka; “The Silence of the Sirens”
“lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shrivelling on their bones”
“Nesting on a pile of human bones, the sisters sang to the sun and rain; their song had the power to calm or to stoke the winds and to inflame men's loins. This music was irresistible, luring many a sailor to their shore -- where he'd pine away without food or drink, unable to break the sirens' spell.”
Terri Windling “Sirens and other Daemon lovers”
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