‌ MY ‌
‌ TEARS ‌
‌ ARE ‌
‌ BECOMING ‌
‌ A ‌
‌ SEA ‌

When specular light bounces off water, it paints a pulsating mosaic. In my tears are becoming a sea, I considered water as a conduit that bridges the timescales of the human body (of which it is the majority), our planet (the sky and sea) and the parallelism of urban construction (which it flows around). When water is gone, so is nearly everything else. I imagined two women who fight the inevitability of drying and shrivelling up: wrapping food, and themselves, to hold the moisture in. I wanted to focus on how the self-presentation of femininity in an ‘is what it is’ dry world equates to self-preservation. What water is gained must be simultaneously lost by another. In consuming another, has Katherine transcended the water of her body, sans a tear?

REFERENCE

  • FEMININITY AND FRONTALITY

    Responding to Valerie Solanas’ ‘Society for Cutting up Men’ manifesto (and her subsequent shooting of Andy Warhol) (Slifkin), Justine Kurland joined reclaimers of the word ‘girl’ through her focus on subjects that “act more often than appear” (Vogel). Kurland’s girls, though placed within a layered mise en scene, project their intentions through the film surface. I was particularly interested in Kurland’s “defiant” and “impassive” (Vogel) alternative-world that emerges in her series, where the tangential presence of men is simultaneously as unremarkable as it is liberating.

  • DISFIGURATION

    Simnett’s multimodal artworks “explore the body as a site of transition” by invoking piercing needles, gigantic gashes, or dripping blood at the most sensitive or intimate parts of the body. Her deep contrasting lighting and grand but sterile settings evoke a sense of disorientation that I sought to follow. With a disfigured body comes the chance of self-reconceptualization: Simnett’s work, which often is presented as multiple artworks of different mediums in conversation with each other (or a film) acted as part of my inspiration to construct a narrative from photographic collage. It is this way that I seek to reconstruct the shriveling life and humanity of my two girl-subjects.

  • INTERLOCUTION

    Finally, Laurence Aberhart’s colour photographs following the parallel & advancing lines of (seemingly eternal) buildings acted as a great contrast to the dysmorphic bodies in my project. I lifted elements of his dusty, pastel colour palette that resulted from an unstable early relationship with colour film. His daughters often unintentionally appeared in his images. Here we see “Kamala sneaking past,” and Aberhart would capture a “critical moment of transition” (Strongman) against the grand scale of building-time. Kamala’s glance to camera is an order of magnitude more fleeting than the morning light that falls on her.

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