Effects asked three sculptors: “What does myth mean to you and your practice?”
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ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE
I am interested in myth as a kind of source code. In my work I am especially interested in mutating this code. If we want to resist or change long held ideas it can be helpful to get to the root of these ideas. Myths are like cultural DNA. Like DNA they seem fixed, but are in fact innately mutable. When we transform the root of an idea, new flowers can bloom.
When I first began working on Orgy For 10 People In One Body, I was very interested in relocating the emanation of desire in representations of the female form. I had been working on building a dataset of nudes in art, from the first cave paintings until now, to train artificial intelligence on. In doing this work, I became thirsty for women’s bodies in art that were not objects of external desire but instead holders and projectors of their own desire and power. I wanted to transform the female body in art from object into subject.
In my research on the nude throughout art history, I came again and again upon depictions of the ancient Greek myth Leda and The Swan. Like any good myth this story is transmuted across time and changes depending on the culture and the particulars of it’s teller’s moment. The main storyline is that Zeus, in the form of a swan, visits the mortal Leda on earth and rapes her. She then lays two eggs. From one of the eggs is born Helen of Troy, who spurs the Trojan War, which itself marks the birth of western classical history and art.
It made sense to me that a rape would be so central to western art’s birth story. And so I decided to fuck with this story to begin my Orgy. The first sculpture in Orgy For 10 People In One Body is a transmutation of the Leda and the Swan myth. In this sculpture, I perform Leda in a cast bronze of my body, while Zeus is represented by a saxophone that I play with my pussy. The beak of the saxophone as swan is connected to my body at the lips of my vagina, and in this rendition all the power in the brass saxophone is being usurped by the bronze body. The saxophone swan is being played by the female figure, and from some angles the swan itself becomes a phallus, another extension of the power and freedom embedded in the body.
This power emanating outward from within the female form became the birth story of Orgy For 10 People In One Body.
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AURIEA HARVEY
It’s not just the myths but how they are told. And retold. I retell the myths from the inside out. They bulge out of my skin. I can see them all around us. “Everything is full of Gods”, said Thales of Miletus. I invoke.
They are stories given to us with no origin. They are open source. The myths are necessary for me. Maybe because they are doing their function of explaining the unexplainable. Sculpture has in common with myth, interweaving of fact (materiality) with fiction (subject) and mixed with imagination (form). The myth is retold through the form.
Myths are not always uplifting but they are meant to be ‘helpful’. They have this in common with folktales. Is the Trojan War fact or fiction? Is Little Red Riding-hood? (Press the ‘Listen’ button) What is it about Echo? Was Andromeda black? In all of these I find, me.
Renaissance artists seeing the ancient grotesques of the Domus Aurea... The myths they re-imagined, from what they saw there, turned the spark of desire for ancient mythological art into a fire within the Christian world. Christians looked back to the same forces of allegory, connecting nature to the divine. St. Francis got a mandate from God to rebuild his church. As he does so, he sings to Mother Earth, Sister Moon, to Brother Wind. The myth is that he wrote the last stanza to Sister Death, from whom no living man can escape, on his own deathbed.
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CLEMENTINE KEITH-ROACH
Myths stretch back and forth in time. They emerge out of frozen landscapes and waxy caves. They move through megaliths, temples, and cathedrals. Embodied in clay, bone, marble and pigments. They linger paradoxically in our demystified world as potential forms that could articulate alternative futures. Myth is a dream-like condensation of social life and a sensuous mediation between nature and culture.
Myth is protean and metamorphic. It shifts and changes according to the social and historical conditions of the time. It moves through history gathering new forms and shedding others. Myth is a site of struggle. It is shattered and reassembled. It’s dead skins can be worn as new clothes, for better or for worse.
Art is the material residue of myth. Images and objects around which people ceremonially gather. Once art, religion and politics were inseparable. We are left with the detritus of these old worlds, scattered shards entombed in museums, archived in libraries, and constellated by algorithms. These fragments, though shorn of context, still vibrate with memory and in their isolation call to be reanimated.
In my work I answer this call. I draw on gestures and poses that reappear throughout art history, in new contexts. Formal expressions of tenderness, mourning, care, burden, empathy and collectivity. I reconstruct bodies from these ‘mythemes’, recombining fragmentary gestures into new mythological formations. But these new chimeras are always incomplete, they are broken, truncated. In their ruinous state they look to the past but also the future and perhaps allow us to imagine new modes of being together and the possibility of reorganisation and renewal.