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BOXES beyond borders

Category: UK

Copper Fish

A simple wooden chest, crudely decorated, is uncovered. What is inside? The lid is pried open to reveal the legendary Copper Fish floating in a sea of bubbles.

On the 25th of November 1922, the first stone was removed from the walls sealing the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. Six years of painstaking archaeology work was rewarded by the discovery of wonderful and curious objects housed in an array of boxes. One can still imagine the thrill that the explorers felt.

The rediscovery of a forgotten or lost box never ceases to inspire curiosity and optimism.

 

Femme

Coast US feminist artists, revisited by key artists of the 1990’s. Exploration of vulval imageries allows me to consider female desire, seduction and discipline, and the role-liquidity of queer sexual play.

The metaphorical cultural veil of a socially/culturally formed feminine is materialized in my use of empty but sexually encoded garments (the little black velvet dress. lingerie, leather, corsetry, gloves) to stand in for the female body. A self-consciously feminist erotic is proposed, carefully controlled through allusion to the actual body, through textual ‘cunning lingua’, through acknowledgment of the seductive territories of sado-masochism, fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and through awareness of the potentially mulitiplicitous desirous nature of the gaze.

New Beginnings

This is not a title of hope but one of irony. We all know that the lady who gets cut in half by the magician appears moments later gloriously grinning in one piece. The sword was real, the box solid, yet we are time and again puzzled by the discrepancy between what we see and what we know.

I have tried with this piece to convey that what we see and what we know is both illusion.

Although the Barbie-like woman, as a trickster, cheerfully saws herself in half, an extra pair of arms, pink and girlish appear like a last minute doubt to the saw. The last laugh and the first tear are closely connected.

 

One Thousand Years of Sewing into the Night

My grandmother’s sewing box, a gift from her mother, handed down to me by my mother, is my inspiration for Women beyond borders. I have made a tiny sarcophagus of pins, cotton and frayed red velvet – to symbolize thousands of droplets of blood from pin-pricked fingers – all embedded in the wax of candles burned into the night, lighting women’s often unappreciated work of skill, toil and pleasure.

 

Notions of Change

On receiving “the box” I had an overwhelming feeling, that the box somehow needed to be destroyed. But how?

The notion of destruction carries a negative taste in our society. However, the box, as symbol of the way we are forced to live and think, needed to be destroyed. How could I make the act of destruction a positive one? The answer lies in the notion of change. Change is the most constant force active in nature and our lives. The laws of change and transformation are natural laws, more important and fundamental to life on the planet than the laws of constancy and preservation.

To express this I did the following:

I decided to break the box into three parts: lid, main body, and head and foot piece.

The lid I buried in the ground to let it decompose.

The main body I burned until only the charred remains were left.

The head/foot piece I subjected to the physical force of a grater to break it into its smallest visible parts.

The Model and the Box

I pay homage to the naked form. In this piece the artist is absent, but her palette remains. The model is not naked but nude. To be naked is to be deprived of clothes, to be nude carries no uncomfortable overtones. She has no vulnerability. She has energy and vitality. She offers this artist stimulation and creative thought.

 

I thank the model, the nude…and the box.