A radical act of remembering

Anatomy is a self depiction, a series of body images in the manner of self portraits, created without recourse to a mirror image. The work comprises largescale coloured etchings, which are assemblages of body prints and collaged 'found' anatomical drawings. The symbolism refers to the pre-Oedipal relation. This issue is met in Julia Kristeva's discussion of the semiotic chora, Luce Irigaray's discussion of Merleau-Ponty's analysis of vision, and other sources that I have referred to which reconsider the Lacanian narrative in psychoanalysis. Much of the debate about women's place in the symbolic realm has been conducted at the level of language. Anatomy contributes a visual parallel: a move to subvert the symbolic centrality of the female body as a passive plane or surface upon which meanings are projected, and to reconfigure a body image which acts as an active signifying entity. The pictorial solution that I arrived at utilises back-lighting to activate the body images, adding a visceral, immediate, and deliberately auratic element to the etched images. The illumination notionally returns the viewer's gaze and creates an intimacy - something like a caress - which alludes to the pre-Oedipal maternal gaze.