Myriad of The Hollows

Posted by salmacaller69 on March 9, 2017

Myriad of The Hollows – part of The Bodies of Dolls series. She is a kind of fertility doll but in fact an Inverse Doll.

As with the bodies of all the ‘dolls’ in this series, her form is based on the ornamental form of the paisley tear drop shape or Boteh. An ‘Eastern’ form. I like to use ornamental forms – arabesques, curvilinear forms, to create a visual language for the female body that moves beyond representation and tries to capture how the forces of cultural, social and religious expectations mark and carve out our bodies. A kind of pain etched out, drawn onto our psyches, mapping zones of traumas, of expectations, of loss but also of sensuality and feeling.

In my visual research for this series, I have been looking at folk forms, notions of the folk doll and more contemporary notions of the ‘doll’ body in fashion magazines, and how these map onto or into the actual woman’s body to create an inner body imagery of distortions.

I feel the interior of my own body as an ornamental map of forces, tensions, hypersensitivity, emptiness, spaces and surfaces.

Myriad

Myriad of the hollows
With an eye in every cell
Splitting and spitting
Seeds and jewels
Saint of the hollows
Myriad of the Sorrows
The vessel of the body curves about a sacred hollow of emptiness
Out of which a carved voice unfolds

That dark pod concealed with a shimmering Membrane

Infinitely embracing each pip
Myriad Miriam Maryam Madonna of the Pomegranate

Resurrection of shadows.

Myriad of the Hollows – graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm

Silk Velvet

Posted by salmacaller69 on January 7, 2017

Silk Velvet Purse Doll:

A mille-feuille

A body of a thousand layers

A thousand gauze tissues

A thousand substances

Concealing a darkened chamber

Entombing

A heavy velvet pouch

Profligate sensual reclining body feeling inwardly

Reaching caressing touching exploring the textures of the inside of a dark and empty space

Where nothing is also everything

A costly ornate body of sensation

Silk velvet skin silk thread silk tassel nerve endings

Silent silken hair spreading

A dense and tactile embroidery surrounds her slits tips lips edges and borders

Wires closely over-sewn create

Her ribs

Brushing stroking heating and burnishing

Made a body that is close textured lustrous gleaming and smooth

Intricate and laborious twisting and twirling of twines

Tiny invisible stitches hold rivets that hold rivulets

Of silk ending in the darkness

Where dreaming continues

The sleeping and dreaming of her invisible body

That dreaming heavy velvet body

Held in the darkness by a skin of sound

Pearl fastenings fasten her breast

Silk velvet velvet silk

Threads pulled tightly holding her in holding her inwards

Net gauze tissue

Lace wire mesh

Feathers

Locks of glossy hair

Fine shimmering strands of metal thread

Seeds metal beads sequins

A weaving of delicate traps that subdue mesmerise and enclose

Hiding her in intricacy and leading to labyrinths of the eternal

Silk Velvet purse – graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm

Shell Bell Shaking Doll

Posted by salmacaller69 on January 4, 2017

The Shell Bell Shaking Doll:

She was a multi-purpose object

And made a variety of textural sounds

Chinking of bells

Clicking of shells

The dull thud of organs suspended within a hollow

Their deep and heavy percussion

Reverberating

Tasselling around her

Prickling

Metallic fragments

Sound out from pale bells

And whitish shells

A chalky body

Carved and curved

Arching over

Her painfully embroidered beaded fabric heart

Lungs of lace rustling

Under a dome

Her shells and her bells

Rang out in another realm

Skeins of silvered twine

Slivers of shivering glass

Pelts of soft fur that cannot warm her

Hand strokes of paint are

Memories of a gentle touch

An aura of sound and movement

Are shaking out of her still

Shell Bell – graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm

Shell Bell graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm

Orebody – revisiting a folk tale and a poem about mining

Posted by salmacaller69 on September 19, 2016

Orebody

Millenia of fusion in the stars

now I am hiding

in a fissure deep in fire rock

above

the pattern of history in stones and bones

sulphurous ferrous coffin cut me out

my body is black and glittering

my body is iridescent slippery

cassiterite chalcocite chalcopyrite

malachite azurite copper peacock

I am hard and beautiful

not how you remember me

you will

break your back to find me

lose yourself in a dark

stinking gleaming black slippery

crack in the world

and stones will break your bones

above

copper butterfly silver studded blue

in a planetary dance but you

bending breaking sweating

hacking picking writhing on your belly

like a snake

lose all your six yellow lives

extract a pain you did not know you had

on a whim

drag my broken body up to light

wash my body

have it dressed caressed

burnish mourn

millenia of fusion in the stars

copper plate

tin spoon

Carved Merwoman – paper on pencil

Carved Merman boat head – pencil on paper

Carved Seagull – pencil on paper

Morveren detail of nets – watercolour on paper 76cm x 107cm

Morveren detail of hair – watercolour on paper 76cm x 107cm

Morveren detail of body – watercolour on paper 76cm x 107cm

Marguerite’s search for her lost body on another planet – part II

Posted by salmacaller69 on June 14, 2016

Wherein Marguerite explores a newly discovered ethereal sensorium on the surface of a pale planet.

She came from one sensorium to a new one where nothing was familiar. Her body could not feel itself through the materials and media that now surrounded it. And so it was lost. It just vanished. So now she roams worlds hunting for a new sensorium where her mind might find her body again, and for it all to make sense.

Note: Before she departed earth to explore new worlds and new realms of sensation-thought, she read that a lady called Constance Classen and some guy called Marshall McLuhan had already found a way to explain how her body might have got lost.

McLuhan called it the Alphabet Effect. A varying ratio of the senses. Each culture values a particular sense or senses over others. So could a person from one culture loose the sense of self when deposited in another culture because their sensorium has developed to create a world of meaning that becomes irrelevant in the new place where these sensations can no longer be felt?

Classen realised that individuals develop a unique sensorium where they dwell and make meaning and some senses maybe deprived so other senses flourish.

Partly a culture defines a person’s sensorium.

Artists, musicians, people who lost one sense or another, or ‘wild children’ or neglected or abused children will develop extraordinary sensoriums where some senses are intensified over others or intermingle in different ways – a synaesthesia.

This is where the body dwells or rather this is where the mind can find its body, feel it and feel the world and make meaning. Materials, media, how the senses use them, by seeing them, smelling them or touching them or all of the above, defines how the body feels and how it makes sense of its environment. If everyone around you sees more than feels, then a body that feels more than sees is lost ? Some worlds are made up of scents. The body comes alive at the scent of jasmine or frangipane. Ethereal body of smell.

Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens

Marguerite’s search for her lost body on another planet – Part I

Posted by salmacaller69 on June 13, 2016

Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens

That Beautiful Deformity – A photoessay on the hybrid grotesque ornamental displaced body

Posted by salmacaller69 on June 2, 2016

‘What is the meaning of those ridiculous monsters, of that deformed beauty, that beautiful deformity ….’ St Bernard of Clairvaux

A juxtaposition of my work and images of hybrid grotesque ornament (grotteschi) from one of my favourite books, Ornament and the Grotesque by Alessandra Zamperini. My work is strongly influenced by these monsters in the margins of Western canonical art. When I came to live in the UK I was drawn to these forms.

As Zamperini says they juxtapose a dream like quality with irony, and my work explores this disruptive juxtaposition of the beautiful and the disturbing. The hybrid metamorphic form brings together the abstract flowing forms of arabesques, with disruptive representational elements. Strongly disapproved of, heterodox, marginal and subversive. Combining poetically outlandish and improbable elements, they evoke the body and all its abject pain, affects and sensations, but also for me they show how the body is in an intense engagement with world, drawing it in and incorporating it.

Coming from a fractured and complicated cultural heritage, they powerfully appealed to my subjective sense of my body as hybrid, fragmented and boundary crossing. Fleshy, carnal, yet ethereal, they appear to be ornaments of no consequence, yet they embed a disruptive and questioning force that made them endlessly fascinating to artists across the ages.