The unwritten rule of art etiquette is 'you can look but don't touch'. In Kate Ellis's exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces feminine wax limbs are displayed in traditional vitrines. Behind glass and out of reach the dismembered arms, curiously sprouting hair and etched with a spiralling pattern, are exhibited in this manner to reinforce the notion of observation at a critical distance. This is a mode of looking particular to art, also associated with the objective scientific gaze ... a scrutinising stare invariably gendered masculine.
The first 'ceroplastic' figures were anatomical models.' These form part of the Medici family's collection held at The Imperial-Royal Museum for Physics and Natural History. Opened in Florence in 1775 the museum is known in common parlance as 'La Specola', meaning 'observatory' in Italian. The female, whole body model in this collection lies on a pink, silk mattress with a string of pearls around her neck. Posed in what looks like a post-coital gesture, she is a disturbing figure, more alive than dead. Still and yet animated, her head tilted back, her lips parted in the aftermath of the 'little death' of the living.
Ellis's hybrid, half animal/half human, whole body is lifeless by contrast. In the catalogue essay Saskia Beudel observes: '[W]axy is an adjective often synonymous with death-the yellowish colour of skin at the moment that blood drains away'.2 But wax also has warmth, evoking the incandescence of melting candles and the softness of the body, making this model uncanny nonetheless. Sigmund Freud's forerunner in the study of 'das Unheimliche' (the uncanny), Alfred Jentsch, used waxwork figures to describe the 'intellectual uncertainty' produced when the border between life and death