Zanna Markillie

 

In this installation piece I am exploring the feminine - my relationship to it, but also how it is represented/or related to in our culture. I used my own body by making a modrock cast and then a latex skin. My body and the earth were the raw materials for this piece - they are seen as one and the same.

 

I wanted to show what it feels like when I am connected to the earth - seen by the skin on the ground that is being filled up by earth. I also wanted to reveal how it feels when I objectify my body, disassociate from my physical experience and the violence of self-judgement. This is expressed through the hanging, lifeless skin and the video projection of me stabbing the earth.

 

The Feminine has fallen off the alter and is no longer revered in our culture. I was interested in Freud’s definition of Fetism - that fetism represents a substitute for the imagined missing penis of the mother - he goes on to say that,

    'The flower of feminine sexuality is perceived as a gash, a wound, a sign of castration’.

 

Here is held an original violence towards the feminine and Freud goes on to describe that this violence and misogyny must lie at the heart of civilisation. In this piece I wanted to express the violence towards the feminine - the violence I sometimes turn towards my own body and, on a wider scale, the violence in which we act out upon the earth.

 

I read about matrilineal society (which predates the Patriachal society in which we live) that,

    ‘each protuberance, be it a mount, a hill, on a menhir or on a female body - belly, buttocks, breasts, knees - was sacred.’

This is the connection I want to reach, where I can relate this to my own female form and initiate a return to what is sacred in our environment.