choric tangles - 2021
Wherefore, let us not speak of her that is the Mother and Receptacle of this generated world, which is perceptible by sight and all the senses, by the name of earth or air or fire or water, or any aggregates or constituents thereof: Rather, if we describe her as a Kind invisible and unshaped, all-receptive, and in some most perplexing and most baffling way partaking of the intelligible, we shall describe her truly.
— Plato, Timaeus, 51a
‘Choric tangles’ is a series of five parchment ‘receptacles’ that plays with the concept of chora. As per the Platonic tradition, ‘chora’ is identified as a passive, formless space; a womb, an empty, invisible ‘her’, that exists, in its non-existence, purely as a vessel that supports the active fashioning of forms, ideas and worlds imputed to male subjectivity. Further, in this male-generated world, this herspace is aligned with the beast where, as Plato suggests, if the appetites, those token of the soul’s materiality, are not successfully mastered, a soul, understood as a man’s soul, risks coming back as a woman, and then as a beast. In this sense, woman and beast are the very figures for unmasterable passion.
Louise Birchall states that Plato’s ‘chora’ is a ‘homogeneous support-space that is capable of assuring the faithful reproduction of the forms “impressed” within or upon it because it lacks any specific properties or characteristics of its own.’ In my parchment-making practice, however, I have come to view skin as a fluid, morphing material that is disinclined to be contained or shaped (without great difficulty) and which still maintains, despite the series of erasures it has gone through, a life.
These nest-like receptacles are not bound by any formal structure, or frame. They resemble a weaving but in fact are held together by the parchment’s own shape-shifting qualities. And, in their form/lessness, they are not fixed, but are constantly changing. In this way, the pieces can be understood as existing within a borderless geography, where any defined boundaries, delineations, are blurred.
Located upon old, weathered slate and accompanied by a wallaby skull and bees, the work is also an in memoriam to the animals whose lives were extinguished along the road and who, via their skins, are now part of a wider becoming. In this way, choric tangles is also a symbolic nod to the cyclical continuum of life, death and rebirth.
As per the Medieval manuscript-making traditions of using natural plant and animal ingredients, the pieces are worked with natural dyes – indigo, lac insects, henna and saffron – beeswax, gold and silver leaf, linen and silk threads, and grass seeds.