She was a great beauty 2019-2020
.
“But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes”
— Weathering by Fleur Adcock
This series of work is an exploration of the inevitable process of ageing and decaying in a world that highly values youth and beauty. Covering fruit with different outer, protective coatings, cut away to reveal the slow but inevitable decay inside, I watch how the inside and outside respond to each other. I have also experimented with then setting this decay and degeneration into resin, as a way of preserving the strange beauty and to stop time. I have also made films using photographs and animation to watch the progress of these living sculptures
A film about the fragility and vulnerability of being an organic entity living with inevitable decay and collapse.
“Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.”
“It’s the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.”
Alexander McQueen - Savage Beauty
RESIN
Organic matter, clothed and made beautiful - the outer shell for all to see. Then watching the inevitable rot and decay within, the cracks and fragilities exposed, the perfection of the form falling apart. Then the attempt to stop this process, to halt the atrophy and preserve what beauty is left.
“Forgetfulness of being is the concern with the world of things and diversions, of idle chat.
Mindfulness of being is the awareness of being and the fragility of being”
Martin Heidegger, 1926
