I have sewn various plant forms out of an old green jumper which will be incorporated into the sculpture somewhere and I made a boob out of plastic rubbish in a plastic bag, shaped and held together with masking tape and then painted with acrylic. It has wires coming out of the nipple which I have started to wind with paper and masking tape. They are to look like milk spurting out. I also started making a red woman puppet, but am not yet sure what I am going to do with her…
I wrote some poetry and painted the letters in multi colours on strips of paper all taped together and draped into the branches. It’s called –
A Mouthful of the Trinity
To sow the gut,
The Source, the vag,
The aqueduct,
The back passage.
The coating in,
The licking of,
The bum, the tit,
The sucking of.
It’s quite gross and in your face. Do I want this? Do I want to shock? It sounds sexual, does that matter? The sculpture is quite in your face and I don’t think shocking or obscene, but more cartoon like and comic, I hope… Someone asked why there were worms (on the wall) if it was about birth…I said it was about composting and decomposing too and, actually I forgot to say bacteria, that’s the link I suppose…bacteria feeding all life.
I looked up the meaning of the word or prefix bio – which means life and eco (which is actually what made me look up bio because I read it on the back of a car and thinking how ironic that was, however ‘eco-friendly’ the car is meant to be. Eco – means not harming the environment… comes from ecology – which is the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical environment or the interrelationship of organisms and their environment, or the totality or patterns of relations between organisms and their environment, it’s from the Greek oikos meaning house, home or environment and logos meaning the study of. So, ecology literally means study of our home. Oh and of course biology is the study of life.
The process of making a car whether it’s an electric car, hybrid, low emission, whatever, causes harm to our home, never mind the petrol/diesel or electricity that runs it, that all does harm too no matter how green or eco its labelled. Its legal to use brand names that are outright lies. You might as well slap a label on a loaded gun that says, ‘doesn’t kill’!
Words are powerful, they make us believe things which often aren’t true. And according to psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who focuses on Affective Science, they can do us physical harm. Our nervous systems are affected by words. They change your metabolism, heart rate, breathing. And the nervous system affects immune response… Anyway, I’ve said all this before and shared research at the start of the pandemic to this effect and though I started writing this because of thinking about the effect of the words in my poem, this isn’t as directly linked to this semesters work, as last semesters and though it is a continuing interest and will probably always be a thread through my work, I am going to shut down the angry rant now!
I would like to try making a short film about the effect of words sometime…
But I have plenty of other videos to finish and I need to decide how I am going to present them and the installation and paintings for assessment first!
Rachel Bride Ashton 