I collaborated with Joana Cifre Cerda in September, producing the dress to be unearthed in the live piece for The Fish that Bit Dad, (the 5th the of 6 Degrees exhibitions at Monk’s Road Gallery, Lincoln). We talked of wild poppies on scrub-land, of petal-fine crumpled fabric stuffed in a bottle… lost…a message… dig it up with bare hands… birth it, wear it.
‘Vasalisa’ is the old Russian tale of woman’s initiation; one that concerns the realisation that most things are not as they seem; to remind us to use all our senses to sniff out the truth, to extract nourishment from our own ideas, to be keepers of our own creative fires and to have intimate knowing of the life/death/life cycles. One of Vasalisa’s tasks is to stand the face of the fearsome wild hag without wavering.
“facing the imago of the fierce mother (meeting up with the Baba Yaga), familiarising oneself with the arcane, the odd, the ‘otherness’ of the wild Continue reading
The paralysis had set in around mid May. A sensation of numbing began in my fingertips at first, it felt like I was typing in thimbles. As it crept up my hands I was holding pencils with mittens, (Kevlar mittens). Soon my arms in plaster, legs in concrete, torso in a fat-suit and my head in dough. Little got through this get-up and there was nothing whatsoever coming out. Continue reading
“I don’t always need the human body to talk about humanity.” March 2011, Interview with Berlinde de Bruyckere
