Organorum

plaster cast ham leg/ wax cast ham leg 65 x 40 cms,, video, 3D printed nose, 2020
 

Installation at the WIP show February 2020 at the RCA. An article on the lived experience of women in the middle east and Asia led to my researching on the relationship between body memory of pain and it’s reinforcing the notion of femininity in girls. The aversion of raw meat in the butcher shop by some of the interlocutors gave led me to experiment with casting a leg of lamb in silicone and then in jesmonite and wax. Materials are a conduit to expressing ideas and emotions and this project allowed me to experiment and learn.

 

With further reading up on the thinking on female sexuality in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was during the industrial revolution and the major development of cities and modern lifestyles that was thought to cause lethargy or melancholy, leading to hysteria. At the time female patients sought medical practitioners for the treatment of hysteria. The rate of hysteria was so great in the socially restrictive industrial period that women were prone to carry smelling salts about their person in case they swooned, reminiscent of using odours to coerce the uterus back into place.

Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess, whom Freud had called “the Kepler of biology”, had developed theories today considered pseudoscientific, including the belief that sexual problems were linked to the nose by a supposed nasogenital connection. Fliess had been treating “nasal reflex neurosis” by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anaesthesia.

This became the impetus to make the large CNC Nose object for the installation.

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