Myriad of The Hollows
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Glassfire
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

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

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

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

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

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

Glassfire – graphite Indian Ink watercolour collage gold dust on acid free cartridge paper 59.4cm x 84.1cm
A Displaced Anatomy
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…
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Marguerite’s search for her body on another planet – part III
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
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Marguerite, wool, pastel on watercolour paper – vintage Vidicon lens
Orebody – revisiting a folk tale and a poem about mining
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
Fantasy and Trauma – The Nacreous Virgin 54cm W x 140cm H
Marguerite’s search for her body on another planet – part III
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.