Intimate Fragility

Caroline Moran
Ireland 1999

We are born into an intimate relationship of close bodily contact with our mothers. Touch is so basic, the mother of all senses that we tend to take it for granted. Without our noticing it, we have gradually become less and less tactile, more and more distant and physical untouchability has been accompanied by emotional remoteness.

The most tactile receptor on our body is the skin, and with force can be torn to shreds like our emotions. The symbol and carrier of life is the egg, characteristically feminine and fragile. The shell of an egg appears hard, tough skinned, breading through to the secondary layer its protective skin, we find it thin and fragile.

Material alone can define work, if perception is directed first to the material, the ideas in the work are often undervalued and the message becomes secondary to the medium. Hemming in the box in fabricated egg I have reinforced my ideals.