I see the body as a charged site with a thin veneer underneath which memory of pain and of healing join together. At times this surface may erupt from the struggle beneath and there may be an effort to mend this eruption. When such a mending happens with the intention to gloss over the pain and deny its memory strange and absurd deformations may begin to grow. And when the pain is allowed to surface through the eruption it may become incorporated in the surface as part of a scar which combines the horror of the pain with the beauty of a new reality.
In this series of sculptural pieces I try to focus on both of these possibilities : strange and uncomfortable body formations as well as mended scars which radiate a strange kind of beauty. All of these forms are casts made with handmade paper and some of the casts - such as the hands and feet - are taken from my own body. I use flax paper with a lot of sizing to insure a thin yet strong consistency of the paper which also lends the forms their translucency and skin-like surface. Embeddings such as string or wire serve as 'mending devices' and are also intended to have their own 'decorative' function.
The "Schuttberg" phenomenon is the inspirational foil for this series of pieces - as it is for the November 9 Quilt series. Land and body are related for me in this metaphor and I feel the strong need for a true scar which cuts through such calculated amnesia to stop the process of 'disremembering'.
I believe with Joseph Beuys who said many years ago that Germany yet has to "show its wound" that an honest cultural catharsis concerning the events of the Holocaust has not yet happened because it is painful and deep-seated and takes a very long time. I also believe that such a catharsis needs to begin with the individual and with individual relationships and as such we need to be careful to cultivate the memory of this specific pain until we are ready to look at it honestly. I take inspiration from this quote by Breyten Breytenbach : "You have to spike the self incessantly, you have to probe and prod numbness, you must pickle the heart, you have to resist, you have to fight the leveling or the burying and the forgetting brought about by common places."
(Quoted in "Geoffrey H.Hartman, The Longest Shadow",Indiana University Press, 1996)
