Body in Pieces
Body in Pieces
Sideshow 2010
Nottingham
Rogan's installation sees her exploring new ways of working. The title 'Body in Pieces' references Nochlin's (1) analysis of the 'fragment as a metaphor for modernity' an age in which the individual is constantly migrant, uprooted from home, family and community; in which the intimate narratives of private life-worlds are increasingly internalised, the actor constructing sense of self relationally through giving, receiving, through love and loss, is constantly in the process of reconstruction. This mobility creates a prevailing sense of nostalgic yearning, of homelessness in which the individual seeks belonging, permanence and construction as whole, as existing or having identity.
Thus this work exploits the whole space, surrounding the audence with an installation that explores the idea of identity in terms of 'wholeness' or connectedness in which disconnection is articulated as fragmentary. Fragments are used symbolically throughout this work. Delicate tissue paper forms, taken from commercial dress patterns - immediately both anonymous but intimate, have a skin like appearance and are hung from the ceiling. One wall surface which is untreated plasterwork is covered in a linear pattern of drawings, each one like a hieroglyph representing a fragment of the artist's body. More tissue pattern fragments are attached to the wall above the drawings. Another wall is festooned with gilt and glazed picture frames in which the image is conspicuously absent whilst on the floor are small mounds of gold coloured dust.
The wall drawings are reminiscent of human mark-making (of demonstrating presence or existence) across time from cave painting to fresco etc. whilst the picture frames remind the viewer of casual arrangements of family photographs; of narratives in which identities are constructed and cherished. The gold dust appears at first incidental, a trace, and yet ambiguous, the permanence of the metal set against the ephemeral condition of dust.
Paul Wilson 2010
REVIEW: Body in Pieces: Group Exhibition and Event
Artist’s Home/studio: Woodthorpe, Nottingham
11th December 2010 by Pauline Lucas
A series of earlier works on theme of Body and Soul
Devotion
I travelled to Malaysia and witnessed a Hindu ritual ‘Thaipusam’ at the Batu Caves on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. The ritual involved the devotee being attached to a dais carrying the deity, (in this case the lord muruga), by wires which were then hooked into the flesh on his back. The devotee would pull the dais behind him, up the stairway two hundred and seventy two steps leading to the caves. Once, having achieved this feat, the hooks would be removed.
In the piece titled ‘ Devotion’ cloth is symbolic of skin stretched taut within the space and and sharp hooks pull the surface of the cloth out, reminiscent of the brutal imagery of the Hindu ritual of pierced flesh. This work is a response to concerns with formal religion, particularly Catholicism. In viewing the seemingly primitive and unnecessary physical suffering in the Hindu rite, it became synonymous with the nature of Western religions which use spiritual or biblical texts, to control and manipulate adherents towards a less spiritual experience, to one of a remote and institutionalised an often oppressive and damaging to the believer.
![ROGAN_-_8_Psuche[1]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d58553_acb81a5e6ac54df2ad7d8cc96991a584~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_532,h_399,al_c,lg_1,q_80,enc_auto/d58553_acb81a5e6ac54df2ad7d8cc96991a584~mv2.jpg)
Psuche
Caducus
tissue paper and wax wrapped around wood
