Artist’s statement -
This installation continues recent work that explores the body through physical love or ‘enraptured love’. The representation of times of heightened physical awareness is explored through the use of contained liquids or essences and these record changes in mood, response, and involvement. A fluid consciousness. They are not materials expelled from the body but within it, passively or actively, at all times. The body is also represented in the main text, but the single words are about physical responses to sensation and encounter. The books give an intimacy for the participant, and a private understanding of a relationship. This work is not only about John and me. By enclosing the space almost to the edge of oppression, by the introduction of smells that permeate, intoxicate and seduce, I hope to involve others in the intimacy.
he gave me honeysuckle
I learnt to love roses
gardenias are for others
Feminine desire speaks a different voice. In this installation the rose has been used as a metaphor for feminine desire and the presentation of copper rose thorns, dried rose heads and glass dishes containing drops of essential oils in display like cases allow the viewer to peer into and over the work.
‘The most subtly necessary guardian of my life being the other’s flesh. Approaching and speaking to me with his hands. Bringing me back to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, the other’s hands, these palms with which he approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body and call me back to the remembrance of the most profound intimacy. As he caresses me, he bids me neither to disappear nor to forget but rather, to remember the place where, for me, the most intimate life holds in reserve. Searching for what has not yet come into being, for himself, he invites me to become what I have not yet become. To realize a birth still in the future. Plunging me back to the maternal womb and, beyond that, conception, awakening me to another - amorous - birth.’
- Luce Irigaray 1986
Press
→ Artist explores physical love, Eastern Courier, 22-10-1993