Pink bits
There are human experiences which cannot readily be described in words; effects or phenomena which cannot be easily spoken or written. At a recent conference Sarat Maharaj gestured to such anomalies within any effort at translation.[1]
Through the boundaries of culture and individual identity, art may attempt to translate the 'other' into an experience identifiable to the viewer. It is this continual mutability, intrinsic to visual discourse, which gives it possibilities outside the written or spoken language used to describe it. Maharaj created his own word to describe these experiences–'clitorality '–meaning experiences which may be culturally or socially specific and are therefore difficult to translate into universal meaning.
I was thinking about this as I looked at the moulds Jemima Wyman had arranged on a thin piece of clear perspex which was suspended from the gallery ceiling by fishing line. Pink Bits was a display of four moulds, each obviously taken from the same cast, but varying slightly. Cast in kromapan, their pink colour alluded to a bodily orifice of some kind. It was difficult to tell whether they were moulds of a vagina or a mouth. The hanging shelf was positioned at eye level in the middle of the room. The viewer was able to move around each side of the shelf and to view the objects from every angle, including looking up through the perspex from below. Whether Wyman's moulds were definitively vaginas or mouths seemed not to matter very much. It was the objects' obscurity that intrigued. Wyman set in play a confusion about the identity or origin of these strange moulds. This ambiguity of definition, the way at once familiar and unfamiliar objects and images