| I think about the ways we occupy or encase our bodies: shrouds and wrappings, slipcovers and casings, lovers, children, shelters, clothing, dreams. I imagine our bones, each bone encased in a custom fitted covering, precisely shaped and minutely fastened. I imagine these casings without the bones.
I am making these casings, slipcovering every bone in the human body. I am sewing custom fitted casings of old linen, making rigid cases of gauze and plaster, then using these gauze cases to cast the bones in salt.
I’m a topologist, investigating a process of careful, but ultimately failed, translation. I’m an archeologist, cataloging relics of loss and longing:
• The linen casings, each of which has its own pattern, are shaped and tailored with hand-made cording and a loop for hanging. They are by turns pathetic and cheerful in their collapse.
• The salt bones are dense and inert, commonplace and precious at once, a hard distillation of the moisture which was there.
• The gauze cases, discolored from the process of molding, carry the history of the absent bones. They are protective containers for the salt casts and now-valued objects in their own right.
• The materials, linen and salt, are rich with references to tending and domesticity, preservation and desiccation, ubiquity and scarcity.
These are visceral objects without the viscera—exquisitely crafted, dry and empty, both tenacious and futile in their failure to preserve the thing itself.
More details about my process and my materials and project images are at http://www.culturalterrain.com/boneproject.html/ |