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

Glassfire

Posted by salmacaller69 on January 2, 2017

The Unravelling Glassfire Doll:

Molten

Then violently quenched

Her core a cluster of delicate fractures

Never healed by a gentle annealing

Too quick from the glory hole

Chunked chinked cracked cleaved

From within a deeply frozen stillness a strangely faint sound

Is waiting and at some uncertain time shall detonate

Cold steel lips blew a breath of life from another

A first tiny bubble flickering down a blowpipe

Dispersing throughout her body

Bubbles of air and gases trapped in her cooling molten

Silesia silveria body

A bulbous soliflore

Starkly necked

To bear only one gift

A fluted and embossed tear

Chorded with textures and densities

That throw the light about

A blank and clear complexion

Imploded with a surge of burning rose

Her excess delicately unravelling spun glass

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

Materials for Glassfire

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

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

Posted by salmacaller69 on June 16, 2016

Marguerite studies the sensory ecology of the pale planet in the light of its setting sun. A unique sensory interpretive system is to be found in each new environment. Everything we touch is a world.

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

A Dark Venus

Posted by salmacaller69 on February 12, 2016

A Dark Venus – watercolour on paper, pencil and oil pastel, 56cm x 76cm

calcification ossification bone body time trauma

Posted by salmacaller69 on August 2, 2015

watercolour and gesso on paper 56cm x 76cm

Blue Venus

Posted by salmacaller69 on July 22, 2015

Blue Venus – watercolour on paper 56cm x 76cm

Little Interventions II

Posted by salmacaller69 on February 24, 2015

Little Interventions detail – watercolour on paper

Little Interventions on the surface of paper

Posted by salmacaller69 on February 24, 2015

Little Interventions detail – watercolour on paper

studion image – Little Interventions detail – watercolour on paper

A Displaced Anatomy

Posted by salmacaller69 on February 2, 2015

A Displaced Anatomy
Watercolour and gold paint on paper 97.5cm x 220cm
Some of us who are displaced never had a fixed abode. Like the shaman’s diver bird, we can only travel between worlds, from land to water to sky. Lost everywhere, at home anywhere, we drag fragments from one domain into another, disrupting others boundaries. Mobile bodies of the imagination, shape shifters with wings, fins and scales. When the land is painful we enter the deep water or we dissociate into the sky. Along the way, multiple transformations occur, they are like mutilations, breakages, or fractures, but they are also an incorporation.

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

Incorporate means to take into your body, or give something bodily form. So painful transformations are also incorporations, of contradictions, a harmonising of oppositions, creating a discordia concors.

A harmony of disparate parts. A harmonious discord.

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

The diver bird migrates, on a journey through other people’s meanings, and has to have at least three bodies:

Dispersed Body (Land Body): needed to withstand trauma, dissociation, fragmentation of reality, and a loss of sense of belonging, and an impossibility of wholeness and completeness of body and self.

Out of Time Body (Sky Body): A body that must exist with an altered sense of time. This body also functions as a time machine, where the painful experiences of another generation secrete themselves inside this body and express themselves unexpectedly. This body knows no fixed reality.

Empathic Body (Water Body): The most important body of all, one that becomes the materials it comes into contact with, an empathy with the world and the othernesses of it, dragging materials, sensations and substances inside itself, which then displace fundamental anatomy or even replace it. A body with fluid boundaries, a fluctuating, ever changing body that can accommodate multiple ways of being.

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

Things to do with embroidery left traces in my body. Each needle prick and drawing of a thread. A flower of golden silk I once embroidered to please, now unfurls in a corner of my insides. A piece of torn lace, once a delicate and fragile sensation, now clings near some nerve endings, waiting. Some past fire burnished an odd baroque carving of my gut. Marked, altered, displaced and replaced, my body is not mine.