"SOLACE"
( for Rita)
(Merino Wool, Kombucha Culture with Cochineal Dye)
Average size of each element about 3"x3"x3", on
Table(dimensions variable); 2003
As these shapes emerged from
underneath my hands my mother was gravely ill with a very
vicious form of cancer. She was in Germany, while I have
made my home in America for over 18 years now.
I wrapped small mushroom- like kombucha membrane forms with
white merino wool and felted them, and in the process they
lost their shape and their color bled into the wool around
them. I then cut open the felt to remove the skin shapes to
discard them. Most of the felt pieces turned inside out in
that process, or were pulled toward one side or were
distorted somehow, the negative shape now revealed as
positive.
I couldn’t stop making these pieces. Every single one
was so different, sweet and menacing at the same time. Life
seems to affirm itself even in those forms that threaten
and hurt us. It was as if I was channeling or somehow
conjuring up the shape of her illness, the entities by
which she was eaten alive on the inside. Only this time
they would be the fuzzy “teddy-bear-version “
of cancer, appeased and turned into friends. Yet they have
a strangely unsettling quality to them, so humorous and
playful and at the same time evil, uncompromising:
sensuous, even sexual creatures ridiculing and invading our
bodies, wanting to grow.
These strange entities reside in the tension between the
comfort and domesticity of wool and the gelatinous, oozing,
visceral slimyness of a polymorph lifeform taking over from
the inside.
I felt very uneasy making these. Yet I felt compelled to
let them show me and lure me deeper into their darkness.
When she talked about her illness there was a certain lust,
a wallowing in blood and pus that seemed to somehow bring
her pleasure. As if her pain was the force that drove her,
and suffering made her feel alive. Perhaps it was like
comfort to her to at last- finally-have a visible, tangible
reason for her unhappiness, that dark cloud that had cast a
shadow over her entire life.
Is it possible that I can deflect this, that I can let
those shapes evolve through my art work so they came into
life without taking life?
Nöle Giulini 2004