Hummingbody Featherskin

Posted by salmacaller69 on May 8, 2017

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

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

A Displaced Anatomy

Posted by salmacaller69 on September 19, 2016

Salma Ahmad Caller

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

Posted by salmacaller69 on September 19, 2016

Salma Ahmad Caller

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