22/11/2021 Cells

In my last text, I discussed an abstract of the body, the pulling of the internal into the external. In this text, I would like to spend some time showing and discussing with myself how I have been developing these ideas into artwork and visual exploration.

As always it starts with scrawling in a sketchbook.

These drawings and mind maps I then take to fabric and my sewing machine. I’m using both quilting and sculptural sewing techniques to bring these sketches into artwork.

I am thinking about these bulbous forms, creating cellular spaces. I’m quite getting into the ideas surrounding cells; it is an insular unit with a brain (nucleus) and all the parts to live but, in the case of the human, requires thousands and thousands replicates and differing versions of itself to form a living whole. The cells, in my mind, move around the body (the wandering womb). They live in the dark spaces below the skin, cells within a cell.

Then, as just alluded to, there are all these different constructions and implications of cells. Prison cells, cells as networks, skin cells, blood cells, etc. Our cellular level as the deep-rooted construction of the self and as biological difference from person to person, particularly socially prominent in the biological sex (not gender!!) difference between the human male and female. Those cells that make us as inextricably ours but unfamiliar to us as we cannot see them.

All these thoughts also make me think of Louise Bourgeois’ work. I always find myself coming back to her work. Her way of working with the soft sculpture and the themes of mothers are interests that are also mine. She also made a series of monumental works called cells.

These cells are incredible installations that separate us from the objects within, household objects like mirrors and chairs, or soft sculptures of heads or body parts. Are we to be kept out or they to be kept within?

I think the separation of the viewer from the work is an interesting dialogue, the skin also as a barrier, can an artwork come alive by giving it a structure(bones) and a barrier(skin)? But then, should the artwork be kept separate from audience, the fragility of the work is removed when the barrier is removed.

In terms of my own work which we are discussing here, am I bringing the internal external just to cover it again, to highlight this fragility, or do I want these cells/wandering wombs exposed?

Where do the cells belong if not within the body? If we think of the body as home, do they then naturally sit within a domestic setting?

Once I have resolved the finish of some of my cells, or even before, this is something I will be trying in the next week; placement of the cells. Where does the womb wander out with the body? If I was a cell, where would I go?