Who am I ?
I am a practising artist, I recently completed my Master’s in Art History and theory with Distinction. I am also a Museum Educator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Read more on my biography page.
This is my portfolio site and blog where you can see and read about my work on ornamental bodies, imaginary bodies and entangled bodies. These are objects, bodies or selves that are caught in the margins between cultures and categories, that are entangled in multiple discourses and webs of understanding. They are disputed creatures and identities that must transform, shift and shape change. They are unfixed and hybrid forms that support paradox and contradiction.
My Practice
I paint elaborate, ornamental and fantastical forms using watercolour and drawing on paper, and write tales and text pieces to inscribe these works with further layers of meanings. I attempt to integrate multiple facets in the exploration of the ‘identity’ of the image I am making. I try to show how this is a ‘body’ that is conflicted and entangled in webs of meanings about what it ‘is’ or how it ‘means’.
Find out more about my practice in my Artist Statement.
My Masters Degree
I studied notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ embedded in the ‘grotesque’, the hybrid, the fantastical and the imaginary in Western art historical discourses – in medieval thought on identity and monsters, in the grotteschi of the Italian Renaissance and in the conceptual use of the hybrid ‘monster’ in contemporary art historical discourse.
It was a project that drew on postcolonial theories, identity theory and traditional art historical material to try and understand more about how Non-Western art, ornamental forms and the fantastical came to be marginalised. I explored objects of other cultures collected in curiosity cabinets as hybrid objects of intercultural exchange, like Afro-Portuguese ivory carvings and Aztec codices.
More About My Work
Cyanosis/Indigo Bodies – Recent work on postcolonialism, body, identity, trauma and fantasy
Featherskin – work on hummingbirds and feather ornaments
This tiny ornamental looking little bird has a complex history in colonial trade and was used to ornament objects like fans sold for trade in Victorian times. It is has a mythical status, an ornamental status and is a biologically extraordinary creature.
You can read more about Featherskin on the home page, read about how Featherskin took shape, and take a look at the Featherskin gallery.
The Body of Music
Visit The Body of Music painting gallery, read more about this work or go to The Body of Music text work.
Mythical Bodies
Often my work explores identities embedded in mythical narratives and imagery. You can find Morveren/Orebody and Celestial Navigation in this category. You can visit the Morveren/Orebody painting, read the Orebody text work or find out more about this work.
See Celestial Navigation or read Celestial Navigation or The Journeys of Moths.
Materials
Seven watercolour paintings, each a material representing forms of embellishment and final stages in rituals of making. This was an exploration of notions of ‘embellishment’ and the relationships between hand/mind, painting/making, making/ material and making a material body/identity. Accompanied by a single text work consisting of a group of words relating making processes to rituals involving body, mind, hand and the incarnation of materials. These works were part of a show called Material.Maker.
Visit the Materials gallery.
Salma Ahmad Caller 