Limb Stories and Other Bodily Extensions
The contemporary form of exodus
and the new barbarian life
demand that tools
become poetic prostheses liberating us from
the conditions of modern humanity.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Theres comes a time when you return to a body of work that its is at the heart of your art practice --Limb Stories for me is that. With limbs that extend, bodily parts remixed, and poetic prosthetics of questionable utility, I began examining questions of where are bodies begin, end and join each other more than a dozen years ago. As in the cases with many art practices, woodcarving took a toll on my body Recently I received a new artificial shoulder, my own poetic prosthetic, allowing me to return to wood working and recreating new flows, possibility, and re-imagination of other subjectivities and worlds.
Having been a nurse for many years, I consider the human and collective body in somber terms. My prior work is now a phantom limb, the ethereal action of aesthetic practice born out of a physical practice. I stand at a high counter reminiscent of an operating table, suturing, carving, and constructing sculptural elements for magic rooms. Wooden spoons, interconnecting human and animal wooden limbs padded with baby socks and wrapped in string, some sprouting hair, are totems, tools and chimeras.
This body of work was recently expanded in conversation with Selby Sohn and philosopher, Joseph Tanke in an exhibition at Dream Farm Commons
Spoonfoot is a tool of questionable utility and a body part gone strange. Being that I have been a cook and a nurse I am often confused between the difference between spoons and body parts and where we begin, end and touch or feed each other. Spoons, juxtaposed in size, very large & very small, are also symbols of distribution or who gets what. My series of limb stories are my phantom limbs, reason for carving chimeras and talismans for future possibility. This spoon was featured at Salon Acme 11, Mexico City February 2024
ArmSlingshotSpoon is one of the poetic prosthetics that the philosopher’s Negro and Hardy predict as tools for our new barbarianism. They are assemblages of desire or that what we put together for survival: reaching arms, gentle slingshot weapon, spoon, It is talisman, tool of questionable utility.
These totems for failing systems are precariously leaning reminders of the statue of liberty but with a biomorphic humility, animal legs fusing with human parts - made from wood& tragic dirty baby socks
Tiny Chimeras or Small tools of Questionable Utility are small talismans, charms, chimeras of strange combination:, hair spoons, hair comb, tiny Califas, mythical land of Amazonian women of California Baja and Norte . They are intuitive or burdened with story , all with a strangeness that cause slight displacement of norm slight shifting of subjectivity . They are talismans for magic realms and current and impending global disaster.
Pyramid Joy (above) is another tiny chimera, ancient wisdom turned to new forms of gold
Dirty Bloomers is biomorphic, a humans-eque animal foot with dirty bloomers and hair growing out of the wall behind it, standing in a messy pile of artists charcoal, very dirty and at the same time very clean.
