coup d’oeil art consortium
2033 Magazine St.
New Orleans, LA
[Paverpol glue, polyester resin, lace]
“What is experientially female is the association of desire with space”
Jessica Benjamin
What Jessica Benjamin was referring to, in Giuliana Bruno’s Public Intimacy was the psychoanalytical “desire [of] owning the room, and the desire for ‘a room of one’s own’“ mark[ed as] a female experience” (Benjamin, J., 1986). A female experience because unlike both genders that can house the intellect or the unconscious mind, only women have the possibility of generating the most intimate kind of cohabitation within our bodies by becoming a womb that “fosters intersubjectivity and… ‘the bonds of love’– a [unique] spatial mode of desire”(Bruno, G., 2007).
This reflection poses a question for any female artist: does she own the space she inhabits or is her body owned by the crevices the objects and the rooms generate around her? Isn’t a pair of shoes a room for our feet or architecture a spatial expression of a mind?
This project started by a previous one, scavenging objects from salvage stores, covering them with lace (a precious, inherently delicate fabric) and paverpol glue (one that hardens textiles) to end up almost suffocating them, only so they could leave a “negative” or incomplete copy behind. Sometimes this process eliminated the original object as some teapots lost their spout or some teacups had their handle broken off in order to keep the copy as close to the original. Slowly, the objects became more personal and of daily use, spoons, bottles, shoes until I started longing for bigger ones. My search then became not only for objects but spaces that I lived in and wanted to keep a memory of.
Let it be noted there is always some kind of damage in the process of creating a copy, the fact that I started using a plant was no different when it came to my body. There was an anxiety of mummification while being alive and fixed in one space as a permanent object. The only advantage was I could break away from these periods of immovability and walk through these spaces with a renovated sense of knowledge about them and my body also became a rediscovered topography I thought I knew so well. By caressing these topos or geographies I have learnt to eroticize and appreciate them even more for what they are and it has been painful to let them go (which is pointless because discard and decay is inevitable). Nonetheless they have shed their skin behind, a memory of a fleeting moment where nothing will be as it was, we all traverse, outgrow places, situations and objects, being our body the only desire that accompanies us intimately through time.
Special Thanks to Ken Capone, Scott Oman, Monica Fernández, Mary Burge for the beautiful video, Jacqueline Bishop, and Mr. H from Promenade Fabrics in New Orleans.