Salma Ahmad Caller

Ornamental bodies

Infinite Bodies of Sensation – graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm

About my work: 

You can read a recent essay about my life and art practice here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/muhammad-ali-came-tea-discordia-concors/

And you can see recent work and my process here:

https://www.instagram.com/salmacaller/

And my work published recently here on Poethead – a wonderful poetry blog by Irish poet Chris Murray here:

“The Infinite Body of Sensation”: Visual poetry by Salma Caller

A Displaced Anatomy – Fantasy, Trauma and Postcolonial identities

In these works I have been exploring the link between fantasy and trauma, and in particular the notion that colonialism/Empire has its lasting effects on the identity formation of the private and individual subjectivity.

How has my notion of my identity and my experience of my body within my imagination been affected in insidious and quiet ways by the traumas of patriarchal religious and colonial forces ? The body in the mind is shaped into a fantastical grotesquery by contradictory and painful  forces of warring sects of being that have created an imaginary and visual ‘body language’ that is both beautiful and disturbing, familiar and strange.

Detail from Displaced Anatomy – watercolour and gold paint on paper 97.5cm x 220cm

Detail from Displaced Anatomy – watercolour and gold paint on paper 97.5cm x 220cm

A complex of body sensations and imaginings about my body draw on a colonial past of memories, childhood tales, traumatic social expectations, veils and embroidery.

Trauma creates and produces images, sensations, inside the imagination. My work tries to express not just images but sensations, how the creative imagination and notions of self alter not just how you ‘see’ your body but how it feels.

My perceptions of my body, it’s interior spaces and exterior surfaces, are expressed through watercolour paint, paper and the notion that the hand paints what the body feels, that images in paint are in fact physical formations. My work isn’t about images on paper, it is about body/memory work, the ornamental carved intricacies of trauma on the body/self. The cross-cultural female body becomes a conflicted territory of spaces, volumes, surfaces, skins, materials, substances.

Detail from Displaced Anatomy – watercolour and gold paint on paper 97.5cm x 220cm

This is my portfolio site where you can read more about my work, my artist statement and browse image galleries.

You can also click on the Ornamental Bodies Blog link to see regular posts.