July 11, 2008 - August 08, 2008
Artist's studio
Eros
My contribution to Parallel Universes, a duo exhibition with Cheryl Gage
…as a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch, and the apple pickers forgot – well, no, they didn’t forget – were not able to reach …
Sappho, 7th century BC, fragment 105a
A space must be maintained or desire ends. Sappho reconstructs the space of desire in a poem that is like a small, perfect photograph of the erotic dilemma.
Anne Carson, 1986
Artist’s statement
These works were triggered when I discovered Anne Carson's writings (1986) during some academic research, where she pointed out that Sappho's above poem fragment describes the essence of eros – the bittersweetness of desire, unfulfilled but with still with hope.
In Western cultural mythology the apple is often associated with desire, beginning with the Adam and Eve Creation Story. Taking an apple, I cut it in half and studied its inner core in detail with a magnifying glass. I photographed it the apple's inner structure, cropping more and more with each exposure. These photographs became the source for my first series of monotype prints: eros essence.
MRI imaging technology can delve deep into the brain, the core of our realities. At the base of the brain lies a ring of arteries that supply the brain's blood supply. Medically, it is known as the Circle of Willis, but has also been described by the spiritual philosopher and social psychologist Diarmuid O’Murchu as one of the “sacred spaces in nature”. I appropriated the MRI pattern of the Circle of Willis to extend into the metaphor of desire.
Creating two further monotype series based on eros essence, I over-printed each series with two variations of the Circle of Willis: a boxed version over the second series titled eros contained, and an open version over the third series, titled eros released.
The intricacy of the human brain revealed by contemporary medical imaging reminded me of the way the imagery for the 19th century Art Nouveau movement had developed from the previously unseen and unknown patterns in nature discovered by their new microscope technology. These patterns inspired artists to create anything from fine art to household decoration. Since today we speak of 'wallpaper' to refer to unnoticed backdrops to our lives, this understanding prompted me to create a full room screenprinted wallpaper installation, quantum attraction, to represent the secret state of desire carefully contained within many lives, often undetected by others.
I further created the twin prints quantum eros and quantum chaos using the wallpaper screenprint, one on white paper and one on black paper to represent the light and shadow aspects of eros.
Acknowledgements
The following sources were used to research my topic and provide quotes in the artworks:
Carson, Anne 1986. Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Gamwell, L. 2002. Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.
O’Murchu, D. 2004. Quantum Theology. The Crossroad Publishing Company: New York
O’Murch, D. 2007. The Transformation of Desire. Darton, Longman & Todd: London.
