Muiliere, Memento Mori
This project began as a partner piece to the research I did for my Art History Honors thesis on Matisse and Modigliani. I was examining reclining female nudes all day, and trying to approach them with a historical analysis. What was not allowed to be present were my personal feelings, the way I empathized with the idea of the make gaze and ownership of the body. I made ceramic casts of my body and carved into them my own ideas about my thesis and my own experiences.
In molding my body in the way that the women in the paintings I considered were molded, I not thought I was aligning myself with their stories, but physically shielding myself from their fate. Now I realize I was making myself an object in acceptance of this objecthood that frightened me so much, not as something to be sexualized but a vessel for opportunity, something that tells my own story if you look close enough.
A lot of my focus in this piece has to do with my own subjectivity versus my object presentation. By creating a version of myself that cannot be separated from my words, I obscured myself but also protected myself, recalling Shirin Neshat's work. With my closest friends and parents, I brought the casts to the college solar field, dug a grave for them and buried them. For several months I let the earth take hold and envelop these metaphorical parts of me. Then on Easter I went back and dug the pieces up. As my friends extracted the last cast from the marshy ground I cut off the length of my hair, and braided a strand for each of them, to be held in a small coptic jar. This overall experience was very important to me, in understanding my personal influence on my academic work. It was also a goodbye to my college self as I entered adulthood and got ready to graduate, to leave the community I had become so attached to. I was allowed to shuck off my past self, to honor it, bury it and resurrect it; I was also allowed to move on.
