ELIZABETH PRESA

POST OFFICE GALLERY
University of Ballarat
Tuesday 2 June – Saturday 27 June

BALLARAT MINING EXCHANGE
Wednesday 10 June – Friday 19 June

detail: Rail Cloth

video still

Participants:

Ania Walwicz
Colleen Morris
Jeanette Mc Whinney
Lauren Berkowitz
Tom Nicholson,Tony Birch

Graziella De Clario, Domenico De Clario
Susan Hawthorne   Suzanne Bellamy   Judith Rodriguez
Marisa Fazio, Vivie- Anne Fazzalori.

Dominique  Hecq, Catherine Clover

Lino  Concas , Tommaso  Durante

Elizabeth  Presa , Eduardo Cadava
Chris  Wallace-Crabbe, Kristin  Headlam    -
Kevin  Brophy, Deborah  Walker
Andrew  Lindsay, Anthony Pelchen

Tony Yap, Kavisha Mazzella.
Ruth Lyon, Janette  Hoe

Initiated by Lella Carridies, ‘Drought’ is an collaborative project between writers and artists.  The outcome of these collaborations is a series of artists’ books to be exhibited as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.  The idea of the ‘book’ is broadly conceived to include not only traditional book forms with bound or concertinaed pages, but also soundscape, performance and installation.

‘Drought’ requires each participant to negotiate a translation between three distinct ‘languages’ drawn from a meteological or climatic phenomena, a visual or performative arts practice, and a written text in the form of poetry or prose.  This is a demanding challenge as each ‘language’ posses its own structure, grammar and lexicon – framed by its own discourses, judgments and values.   The task for the artists and writers is to find points of intersection where new interpretations and images can emerge.  Here we might think of the task of translation as being more a matter of interpretation and transformation than of finding exact equivalences.

At the outset the thematics of drought invites us to ‘read’ within a palimpsest of shifting tropes and images in the landscape.  As we do so, we see that this climatic condition is imbued with deep social, economic and political signification.  The American transcendental writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that nothing exists in nature that is not a form of inscription bearing the marks and traces of history.  For Emerson, it becomes a matter of knowing how to read the languages and signatures of nature, and of finding in the “open book” that he calls nature, her incessant narrative.  “Nature is a mutable cloud,” he writes,  “which is always and never the same”.  Through its “endless combination and repetition of a very few laws”, it shapes and names the changing conditions of our historical existence.   Thus, for each of the artists and writers in this project the challenge is to identify and work with processes that reveal the shifting registers of drought in the landscape and beyond.  For some it is a matter of tracing the political and social history of a specific geographical site while for others is question of marking an interiority of thought.

Tom Nicholson and Tony Birch focus on the historical effects of drought upon the Yarra River, while Janette McWhinney develops a process for mapping the labyrinthine movements of the “lost soul in the desert”.  For Dominique Hecq drought is “first and foremost an event of the body” and resonant within her as she writes is Catherine Clover’s soundscape of the shrill song of a dying cicada recorded on a hot evening in suburban Sydney. Colleen Morris uses processes that give form to the degradation of the landscape and river systems.  Domenico de Clario’s ongoing fascination with his mother tongue – a unique dialect from Trieste – makes his collaboration with his own mother, Graziella, all the more poignant as she seeks to give form, through words, to “the lot of the migrant to withstand periods of ‘no spiritual water’”.

In her invitation to the artists and writers Carridies says, “ I am referring to psychological drought, spiritual drought, emotional   drought.  “DROUGHT” with a capital D, as a state of longing, absence, or exclusion”.  Though drought denotes lack and suffering, this project invites participants to redeem and transform through their work something of this loss and alienation.  ‘Drought’ reveals itself as a condition of possibility, whereby lack may become plenitude.

A Silk Room of One’s Own

Elizabeth Presa

2007

Exhibited in ‘This Crazy Love’, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, 28 September – 11 November 2007.

7th October.

The mirror stage (9 November).

Ink.

Emails for Silkworms:

10 October  Jean-Luc Nancy wrote:

“for the silk to come”, je tradis littéralement : “pour la soie de venir”,
la soie de venir, une espèce très singulière e soie, une soie filée d’un continuel venir,
non un avenir,
oas même un à venir,
un venir, un simple, lent et continu venir,
un to come un coming soyeux,
venant soyeusement
joyeusement

Download and read the rest of silkworm emails.

Reading.

[The Space in Between] Book Project.

Curated by Tara Gilbee
VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne
13 July – 4 August 2007
Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery
15 March – 13 April 2008
Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts
8 August – 14 September 2008

Elilabeth Presa, 2007.

Materials:  Cabinet of inlaid walnut veneer and glass, engraved text, gold leaf on empty snail shells, living snails, fruit, air and water.

The title of this work, Distribution of Organic Beings, is taken from an entry in Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the voyage of the HMS “Beagle” round the World.  This entry sits between the ‘Distribution of Shells’ and ‘Tameness of the Birds’ in chapter XVII of the Journal.  Following the form of the Journal my work also gathers itself through observations and facts collected during travels round my world.

In this work, a colony of snails from my garden is presented for view in shop 414 Toorak Road over the six weeks of the exhibition.  Each day I take fresh fruit and vegetables to the snails and clean their house.  The two women in the shop talk with me about the snails.  Hiroko comes from a tiny island, Shodo Shima, in the south of Japan.  Michelle comes from an island in Malaysia.  They miss their homes.  They watch the snails carefully. When the sun shines through the window they cover the Snail House with a pale blue silk scarf and sprinkle water on the snails to keep them cool.  They bring friends to see the snails – an elderly Japanese woman sometimes comes to visit and to look.

The glass and mirrors of the cabinet are engraved with passages from contemporary and historical literary, mythological and philosophical texts.  Together these texts represent something of the complexity of attitudes towards snails and animals more generally.

Snail detail.

Texts engraved on Snail House:

Theodor Adorno  (1903 –1969)

The true symbol of intelligence is the snail’s horn with which it feels and smells its way.  The horn recoils instantly before an obstacle, seeking asylum in the protective shell and again becoming one with the whole.  Only tentatively does it re-emerge to assert its independence.  If the danger is still present it vanishes once more, now hesitating longer before renewing the attempt.  In its early stages the life of the mind is infinitely fragile.  The snail’s senses depend on its muscles, and muscles become feebler with every hindrance to their play. Physical injury cripples the body, fear the mind. At the start the two are inseparable.

…The suppression of this potential by the direct resistance of the natural environment is carried a stage further as internal organs begin to atrophy with fear…a preliminary groping of this kind is always easily thwarted; it is always backed by good will and faint hope but not by unflagging energy.  When facing in the direction from which it is finally scared into retreat, the animal grows timid and stupid.    Stupidity is a scar. 

Dialectic of Enlightenment

John Berger: (1926 -)

Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal.  At the most the animal gaze flickers and passes on.  They look sideways.  They look blindly beyond.  They scan mechanically…The look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had lived until less than a century ago has been extinguished.  About Looking

Sydney Clouts (1926 –1982)

..and a snail hearing the rhetoric of nitrogen and hydrogen, has slowly spread the maxim: the nervous system ails the stars. ‘The melon stalk, the melon…’;

Friedrich Engels  (1820 –1895)

( I experience) a withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the other animals. At every step one bumps up against the most complete uniformity of structure with the rest of the mammals, and in its main features his uniformity extends to all vertebrates and even – less clearly – to insects, crustaceans, earthworms etc.

St. Francis of Assisi  (1181 – 1226)

The very first animal to appear at the gates of heaven was the snail. St. Peter bent forward tapping the snail with his staff, and asked, “What are you looking for here my fine little snail?” “Immortality” the snail answered politely. Peter howled with laughter. “Immortality! And just what do you plan to do with immortality?” ”Don’t laugh,’ the snail countered. “Aren’t I one of God’s creatures? “Aren’t I a son of God just like the Archangel Michael? . . . Archangel Snail, that’s who I am” “Where are your wings of gold, your scimitar, the scarlet sandals betokening your regality?” Peter replied. ”Inside me, asleep and waiting.” “Waiting for what?” “Waiting for the Great Moment,” replied the snail. “What Great Moment?” “This one now!” said the snail. And before he had finished saying ‘Now’ he took a great leap as though he had sprouted wings, and he entered paradise. . . St. Francis finished by saying to his followers “Do you understand? We are just like Brother Snail. Within us are the wings, the scimitar and the royal sandals. If we want to enter Paradise we can at any moment. We must simply want it more than anything else and we must be willing to take the leap . . . jump!”

Karl Marx  (1818 – 1883)

The nobility takes a natural pride in its blood, its extraction, in short the whole life-history of its body: this is its natural, zoological way of thinking and heraldry is the science appropriate to it. Thus zoology is the secret of the nobility. Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State.

Militant Esthetix

Animals were once resident at the centre of the human world, subjected to power but also worshipped, endowed with magical significance and anthropomorphized. But these animals ‘disappear’, during the process of urban industrialization in the nineteenth century. They re-surface in this new context, first as machines, and later simply as so much raw materials – meat, leather and horn, equivalent to iron, cotton or coal.

Descartes conceived of animals as soulless machines. In order to prove that animals have no soul Descartes nailed his wife’s dog by its four paws to a board and dissected it alive, thereby installing a common practice for scientific researchers at London’s Royal Society. Live animals flayed and dissected appeared to the vivisectionists as watch or clock mechanisms. Ostensibly activated by wheels, ratchets, springs, gears and weights, they were conceived as automatons

Hermann Samuel Reimarus  (1694 –1768)

Descartes had the idea that one could explain all the actions of animals as a mere mechanism, without attributing to them a soul, a life, sensitivity or imagination. He proposed that they were nothing but lifeless machines, which had been structured so artfully and subtley by the creator that, through the external impression in their limbs, of light, air, noise, evaporations, etc, they were set in motion such that it appeared to us as the voluntary actions of a living creature …. It makes the vast majority of nature dead.

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenna trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf.

A Vietnamese folktale

In the mountains overlooking the Red River Valley it is told of a good family with two fine daughters who seemed always to be doing their duties; yet one day, by and by, while returning home, they stopped to eat some figs and that evening felt very strange. In time, both sisters gave birth, one to a worm and one to a snail.

Mars Gallery, 2007.

Elizabeth Presa

Video (6 minutes), mixed media.

Genesis tells us that birds played an important part of the story Noah and the ark.  Yet they seem the most transitory of creatures as they move effortlessly between water, sky and earth. Two years ago, in the winter, a pair of black swans came to Hampton beach on Port Phillip Bay, then disappeared.  Last winter in Paris I noticed a pair of white swans near where I passed each evening. One evening they were no longer there. Things surface and resurface, become visible then vanish, they make their dwellings, then erase their traces.

What is most beautiful is precisely that which is most transient.

Elizabeth Presa, Melbourne, 2007.

“Each one of us must accomplish Noah’s mission afresh.  We must be the pure individual arc of all things, the refuge where they are not content to be what they were or imagined themselves to be, narrow perishable life traps, but where they become transfigured, free from form, and merge completely into the inwardness of their essence where they are somehow preserved from themselves, untouched, intact, at the pure core of indeterminacy.  Yes, each of us is Noah.  But our mission consists less in saving all creation from the flood than, on the contrary, in plunging it into the deepest waters where it vanishes permanently and radically.  Indeed such is man’s vocation.  If everything visible must become invisible, if this metamorphosis is our purpose, then this intervention is apparently quite superfluous – the metamorphosis will occur quite naturally on its own, for everything is transitory and what is transitory always sinks into profound existence.  So what use are we in this lifesaving mission, we, the most transitory of all things, the first to disappear?  What is useful is our readiness to disappear, our ability to perish, our fragility, our weariness, our aptitude for death.”

Maurice Blanchot,    The Siren’s Song.

L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Spacement Gallery, Melbourne, 2005.

This installation explores two interrelated questions: How can a sculptor, whose practice is based on the three dimensional forming of images approach video as a form of material making and touching? Secondly, how can an existing work of sculpture, from another time and place, be resuscitated and revivified through a film medium and through a form of words?

The installation is comprised of a DVD split screen projection of a plaster sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon of Madame Houdon (1786, Louvre Museum) and the close-ups of the letters and words of a text by Jean-Luc Nancy written to accompany images of the sculpture; a plaster slab that have been set with the water from the Seine; and paper printed with text. The plaster contains air bubbles, scratches and marks caused by accidents of the casting process. The video acts as a way of recasting or making anew the image of the portrait of Madame Houdon. The camera, held against my body, animates the frozen stillness of the sculpture with the rhythm of my breath. A carefully modelled mouth, a smile, set for centuries in plaster, flickers and trembles as the camera focus fails and readjusts. Light spills across a cheek, under her chin then down her neck. A forehead glows as the moon. The lens traces fractures and stains along the white plaster. Reflections – windows of the Louvre, the sky, marble portraits of aristocrats across the room – move in and out of focus on her plaster skin. Resonating with the echoes of visitors voices, her smile fills the room. The same filming process animates the text.

These fragments of dust, sound, and light – the momentos of the day surrounding the sculpture- gather in the image projected onto the plaster slab. From frozen plaster to shifting light she returns through the screen to her material origin. To the left, fragments of the text ‘Marie-Ange, Elizabeth’ by Jean-Luc Nancy move in and out of focus as shadows of birds and sunlight flicker behind the words. Light and shadow pass beneath and beyond the image of the sculpture and the image of the text.

MARIE-ANGE, ELIZABETH

Au milieu de l’espace immobile et de la mémoire figée d’un  musée, elle sourit nuit et jour, dans l’obscurité comme dans la lumière. Elle sourit dans le jour levant encore libre de visiteurs et dans la foule des après-midi. Elle sourit sans discontinuer, sans jamais refermer ses lèvres entrouvertes et presque retroussées sur une rangée de dents. Presque des lèvres d’animal qui pour un peu se relèveraient en babines et ne seraient pas loin de pouvoir mordre une petite proie, une souris qui viendrait à passer, une souris qui sourirait, prête à mordre dans quelque miette  ou dans l’image d’un fantôme qui se promènerait dans les salles vides. Mais ce fantôme est précisément celui de Marie Ange Cécile Langlois, épouse de Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculpteur.

Comment une statue peut-elle sourire ? Sourire n’est pas un état, moins encore que rire ou que pleurer. Sourire est un passage, un geste fugitif, une esquisse, une ébauche. Le sourire de Marie-Ange donne à toute sa sculpture le caractère de l’ébauche. Elle est encore devant nous comme humide dans sa terre fraîchement modelée, à peine dégagée de ses linges mouillés dont la légère sueur brillerait sur cette lèvre soulevée comme au bout de la tresse défaite ou bien sous l’arc des sourcils que fait lever le mouvement du sourire.

Mais encore une fois, où est ce mouvement ? Où se mobilise-t-il dans cette immobilité ?  Partout, de l’épaule aux paupières, dans les fossettes et dans la légère traction qui remonte les joues vers les ailes du nez, partout le sourire bouge, ébranle, émeut la masse légère du plâtre, et de telle façon que celui-ci vient s’entrouvrir sur ce que son épaisseur dissimule et que nous savons être une âme, un esprit, comme on voudra dire, une pensée, presque une distraction peut-être. Nous le savons, oui, nous le savons bien que dans ce creux que laisse deviner la commissure des lèvres se loge toute l’âme de Marie-Ange. Nous le savons mais ce savoir ne nous sert de rien car son sourire ne va pas plus loin qu’à nous laisser flotter sur le seuil de ce savoir comme de cette bouche et de son âme.

Bien d’autres bustes autour d’elle sourient dans la vapeur impalpable du musée, comme Madame Adelaïde et la Comtesse de Jaucourt ou Sabine Houdon et Benjamin Franklin aussi bien que Buffon. Les créatures de Jean-Antoine sourient volontiers, elles livrent volontiers une humeur de léger amusement ou bien une finesse d’esprit. Même la Diane chasseresse sourit, mais toutes et tous sourient les lèvres closes et nul ne laisse voir ces dents qui s’avancent imperceptiblement  sur la lèvre inférieure de Marie-Ange et qui nous en font éprouver la pulpe comme ne le fait nulle autre statue sinon le buste de Sophie Arnoud, la comédienne, qui entrouvre des lèvres prêtes à exhaler un soupir ou à recevoir un baiser, cependant qu’un peu plus loin les lèvres de Cicéron s’entrouvrent elles aussi mais pour remplir bientôt, on le devine, leur office oratoire.

Marie-Ange ne va pas parler, elle ne va pas non plus soupirer ni donner ou recevoir un baiser. Elle sourit à son sourire même. Elle le tient suspendu sur lui-même, égayé de lui-même et de cette immobilité où il se laisse saisir par le désir de Jean-Antoine qui lui-même, à n’en pas douter, est saisi par lui. Jean-Antoine essaie d’un même mouvement de saisir Marie-Ange et de se dessaisir pour elle de sa maîtrise de sculpteur, certainement  aussi de cette autorité que l’homme de ce temps détenait comme par nature.

Cette femme sourit d’échapper au pouvoir qui la façonne et à l’autorité qui régit sa place et son allure. En souriant elle s’échappe doucement du plâtre et du musée. Elle laisse seulement flotter son sourire comme le fait le chat d’Alice. Elle aussi, Marie-ange, elle vient de l’autre côté du miroir et des grandes fenêtres à travers lesquelles on discerne la lumière de l’Ile de France. Il vient de là, ce sourire, il vient d’un sourire enfoui derrière les façades de Paris et sous les eaux de la Seine. Plus tard, en effet, bien longtemps après que Marie-Ange et Jean-Antoine auront quitté ce monde, on trouvera dans ce fleuve une noyée souriante, une inconnue dont l’image imprimée dans la cire d’un masque mortuaire troublera plus d’un poète adolescent et peut-être quelques philosophes mûrs.

Comme l’inconnue dans les eaux de la Seine, Marie-Ange flotte dans la lumière incertaine du musée : quel qu’y soit l’éclairage, en effet, un musée diffuse toujours en lui-même un halo d’incertitude, une brume ou simplement une distance qui brouille le regard de manière impalpable. Nul ne sait où il est, ici, ni le visiteur, ni le visité. Marie-Ange se sait visitée par tant de gens qui ne la connaissent pas, dont beaucoup ne la regardent pas, dont plusieurs se tournent plutôt vers le sein de Sophie Arnoud ou vers le charme des enfants. Elle sourit de leur curiosité convenue et de la distraction de beaucoup d’autres.

Passe une femme, du nom d’Elizabeth, qui rend à Marie-Ange son sourire, qui lui prend son sourire dans une caméra et le lui rend dans un autre halo, dans une aura numérisée qu’elle a été chercher au fond du fleuve et dont elle lave longuement l’écran sur lequel le sourire se laisse devenir plus proche et plus lointain, plus inquiétant, plus immobile, toujours sans fin revenant en lui-même tout sonore des passages et des rumeurs de la foule affairée, mais parfois, presque imperceptiblement, découvrant vers nous des dents de jeune carnassier.

Jean-Luc Nancy

MARIE-ANGE, ELIZABETH

Jean-Luc Nancy

In the midst of the still space and fixed memories of a museum, she smiles night and day, in darkness as in light.  She smiles in the arising day still free of visitors and in the crowd of afternoons.  She smiles without discontinuing, without ever closing her half-opened lips, almost rolled up over a row of teeth.  Almost the lips of an animal, which for a while would be raised in a snarl ready to bite a small prey, a passing mouse, a smiling mouse, ready to bite into some crumb or into the image of a phantom wandering the empty halls.  But this phantom is precisely that of Marie Ange Cecile Langlois, spouse of Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculptor.

How can a statue smile?  Smiling is not a state, even less than laughing or crying.  Smiling is a passage, a fugitive gesture, an esquisse, a draft.  Marie-Ange’s smile gives to the whole sculpture the character of a draft.  She remains before us, as if moist in her freshly modelled clay, barely free of its wet rags and whose light perspiration would shine on a lip raised as if on the end of her unplaited tress or else under the arc of eyebrows lifted by the motion of a smile.

But once again, where is this movement?  Where in this immobility does it mobilise itself?  Everywhere, from shoulder to eyelid, in dimples and in the light traction which raises cheeks towards the wings of a nose, everywhere the smile budges, trembles, unsettles the light mass of plaster, so that it comes to part what its thickness dissimulates and that we know to be a soul, a spirit, as we might like to say, a thought, maybe almost a distraction.

We know it, yes, we know well that in this hollow that the corner of the lips leaves us to imagine, comes to lodge the soul of Marie-Ange.  We know it but this knowledge is useless to us because her smile goes no further than to leave us hovering on the threshold of this knowledge as of this mouth and of its soul.

Many other busts around her smile in the impalpable vapour of the museum, like Madame Adelaïde and the Comtesse de Jaucourt or Sabine Houdon and Benjamin Franklin as well as Buffon.  Jean-Antoine’s creatures smile gladly, they deliver gladly a humour of mild amusement or else a fine wittiness.  Even Diana the hunter smiles, but all of them smile with closed lips and none allows to be seen these teeth which advance imperceptibly on Marie-Ange’s lower lip and which bring us to an experience of the pulp like no other statue, apart from the bust of Sophie Arnoud, the actress, who parts lips ready to exhale a sigh or to receive a kiss, while a little further on, the lips of Cicero also part but to shortly perform, we imagine, their oratical office.

Marie-Ange will not speak, neither will she sigh nor give or receive a kiss.  She smiles at her smile itself.  She holds it suspended on itself, enlivened from itself and from this immobility wherein it lets itself be seized by the desire of Jean-Antoine who is himself, without doubt, seized by it.  Jean-Antoine tries in the same movement to seize Marie-Ange and to unseize himself of his sculptor’s mastery for her sake, and certainly also of this authority that a man of his time would have possessed, as if naturally.

This woman smiles that she might escape the power that fashions her and the authority that governs her place and her allure.  In smiling she softly escapes the plaster and the museum.  She just leaves her smile floating like a Cheshire Cat.  She also, Marie-Ange, she comes from the other side of the mirror and the large windows, across which we see the light of the Ile de France.  It comes from there, this smile, it comes from a smile buried behind the facades of Paris and under the waters of the Seine.  Later, actually long after Marie-Ange and Jean-Antoine will have left this world, a smiling drowned woman will be found in this river, an unknown whose image imprinted in the wax of a mortuary mask will trouble more than one adolescent poet and maybe a few mature philosophers.

Like the unknown woman in the waters of the Seine, Marie-Ange floats in the uncertain light of the museum : in fact, whatever the lighting, a museum always disperses into itself a halo of doubt, a haze or simply a distance which impalpably blurs the gaze.  No one knows where it is : here, neither the visitor, nor the visited.  Marie-Ange knows herself visited by so many people who do not know her, among whom few look at her, many of whom turn rather towards the breast of Sophie Arnoud or towards the charm of children.  She smiles at their polite curiosity and at the absent-mindedness of many others.

Comes a woman, by the name of Elizabeth, who returns to Marie-Ange her smile, who takes the smile from her in a camera and returns it to her in another halo, in a digitised aura that she has sought in the depths of a river and with which she washes for a long time the screen on which the smile allows itself to become nearer and farther, more troubling, more immobile, always without end returning into its sonorous self the passing and the rumours of the busy crowd, but sometimes, almost imperceptibly, revealing to us the teeth of a young carnivore.

Translated by Michael Tawa

Elizabeth Presa

Materials:  plaster, gauze, saltwater, medusa skin, mirrors.

Dimensions: variable

Mars Galley Melbourne

10 – 31 August 2005

 

This installation entitled “Moon Water” includes a sequence of photographs of the moon taken during one night from my bed overlooking the Seine in Paris.  It also includes hundreds of plaster and gauze moulds of jellyfish, and a collection of mirrors whose silver tain has worn away with the passing of time. Each morning, over many weeks in Autumn and Winter, I collected and moulded the large iridescent blue jellyfish that had washed up on the shores of Hampton and Beaumaris on Port Phillip Bay.  Within days the luminous blue liquid bodies of the jellyfish evaporated, leaving only a barely perceptible skin clinging to each moulds interior surface. The moulds swarm, face-up, across the floor.  The mirrors shimmer like frozen tidal pools at dusk.  What was once living and liquid, petrifies to a silvery stillness.  

As a forensic medium the plaster gives permanence and shape to that which is transitory, and often concealed. In this work plaster records not only traces of death but also the process of evaporation. The moulding process transforms the voluminous and heavy liquidity of the jellyfish to a state of “weightless grace”. The process exposes all the scratches, wounds, bruising and swellings caused by the turbulence of storms, tides and currents.  But what was hidden is now revealed in reverse, as opaque slivers and lumps drawn across delicate epidermal layers of wrinkles and folds embossed with tresses of tentacles and seaweed.  The sea’s motion inscribed in the soft bodies of the creatures is now frozen, held intact, hardened and set in time.

The photos and moulds bring together a nocturnal scene between two hemispheres; between the sky and the water, and the river and the sea.  The alchemist and astrologer Paracelsus believed that the moon impregnates the substance of water with a noxious influence, and that water, which has been exposed to lunar rays for a long time, remains poisoned water.  He wrote that the moon gives to those whom it influences a taste for water from the Styx.

The plaster moulds become vessels of white opaque skin – small sepulchres for the delicate remains of creatures that once swarmed in the moonlight.  Each takes on the lunar roundness of a face.  A face that exposes, with the hard resistance of eyes without protection, what is softest and most uncovered.  Like a lunar skin, they reflect the grace and violence of the sea.

Catalogue essaye by Jean-Luc Nancy.

English translation by Julia Pound

MEDUSE-GELEE

Comme il est étrange que l’animal nommé « méduse » en français soit appelé « jelly fish » – ou bien « jellyfish » en un seul mot -  en anglais ! Quelle distance entre le mot gréco-latin, passé dans les langues romanes mais aussi dans le russe ou l’arabe, et le terme anglo-saxon que d’autres familles linguistiques ont repris. D’une part on a le nom de l’une des Gorgones, de l’autre on a un mot composé « poison-gelée ». Un personnage et une substance. Une figure terrible et une pâte molle, gélatineuse et tremblotante.

Medousa, la seule des trois Gorgones à être mortelle, est aussi celle dont l’aspect terrible pétrifie celui qui l’affronte (il a fallu la ruse de Persée pour lui renvoyer à la face son visage reflété dans le bouclier du héros). Sa chevelure de serpents a transmis son nom à l’animal dont l’ombrelle abrite une poignée de tentacules qui ondulent au rythme de sa nage nonchalante.

De la figure furieuse et  redoutable jusqu’à la masse molle et paresseuse, quelle continuité ? Sans doute, on sait que ces animaux peuvent provoquer des brûlures, mais ce n’est pas ce qui les rattache à la Gorgone sœur de Sthenno et d’Euryale. Il faut chercher ailleurs comment Medousa peut être égale à gelée.

Elizabeth Presa propose unesolution de l’énigme. En laissant sécher la peau des méduses, dont elle prend l’empreinte, elle rapproche la gelée translucide de la surface d’une lune blafarde. Elle comprend avec Paracelse cette peau figée et grêlée, comme le produit empoisonné de la mer infectée par l’exposition aux rayons lunaires, et la compare à l’eau du Styx.

Nous sommes donc déjà dans les parages de la mort et de l’effroi. En vérité, la peau lunaire et grenue qui tourne vers nous son crible aveugle nous présente un visage sans vision, un regard retiré et crevé de mille piqûres d’épingles, une sorte d’Œdipe multiplié dont le sang ne coule plus et dont la face lavée et livide expose un secret redoutable : un emblème, un symbole ou une hypotypose de la défiguration dernière. Alors nous comprenons que la gelée peut délivrer autant de force pétrifiante et glaçante que l’aspect insupportable de la Gorgone. En vérité, nous comprenons que la puissance de Méduse n’est pas comme on la représente souvent celle d’un éclair fulminant ni d’un visage chargé de cruauté. Sa puissance est plutôt celle des yeux enfoncés sous la peau, celle de peau privée de chaleur et de forme au contact de laquelle nous éprouvons en même temps la dureté et la mollesse, l’enfoncement dans la masse indistincte et la suspension flottante à la surface.

Nous sommes au plus près de la caresse, nous pouvons être émus par ce reste encore tremblant de peau qui pourtant déjà s’est emplâtré et dissimulé dans une épaisseur crayeuse. Nous sommes au plus près d’une confiance dont nous savons qu’elle nous aspire vers la noyade. C’est inquiétant, cela nous communique ce qu’on appelle en français « chair de poule » et en anglais « goose flesh » – encore une animalité dont l’étrangeté nous colle à la peau. L’émotion de la mer profonde et de la lune, l’émotion de la peau caressée, de la caresse désirée et redoutée, l’émotion de ce qui peut aller trop loin, jusqu’à chavirer dans les larmes ou dans l’angoisse aussi bien que dans le trouble et dans l’excès d’un plaisir dont la seule mesure est de toucher à l’impossible et à l’insupportable. « Jelly », c’est la caresse et le regard de la Méduse, c’est son regard caressant, son regard glissant absent sur notre face qu’il lave et qu’il fige en même temps.

Jean-Luc Nancy

 

MEDUSA-JELLY

How strange it is that the animal named “méduse” (medusa) in French is called “jelly fish” (or “jellyfish” in one word) in English! What a distance there is between the Greco-Latin word, incorporated into Romance languages but also into Russian and Arabic, and the Anglo-Saxon term that has been appropriated by other linguistic families. On the one hand, we have the name of one of the Gorgons, and on the other, a compound noun composed of “jelly” and “fish”. A character and a substance. A terrible figure and a piece of limp, gelatinous, trembling flesh.

Medusa, the only one of the three Gorgons to be mortal, is also the figure whose fearsome appearance paralyses those who confront her (it took Perseus’ cunning for her face to be reflected back to her in the hero’s shield). Her snaky locks gave the name to the animal whose umbrella rests atop a handful of tentacles that ripple with the flow of its nonchalant movements through the water.

What continuity is there between this furious, awesome figure and a limp, idle shape? One undoubtedly knows that these animals can cause burns, but this is not what links them to the Gorgon sister of Stheno and Euryale. One must look elsewhere to understand how Medusa can equal jelly.

Elizabeth Presa offers a solution to this enigma. By leaving the skin of jellyfish to dry and taking their imprint, she draws a comparison between the translucent jelly and the surface of a pale moon. Like Paracelsus, she sees in this rigid, pock-marked skin the poisoned product of a sea infected by exposure to moonbeams, and compares it to the water of the Styx.

Here, we are already in the region of death and terror. In fact, this grainy, lunar skin which shows us a blank screen presents us with a visionless face, a remote expression that is riddled with a thousand needle holes. It is a kind a reinforced Oedipus whose blood no longer flows and whose cleansed, pallid face exposes a formidable secret: an emblem, a symbol or a sketch of the ultimate disfiguration. So we see that jelly can deliver as much petrifactive and icy force as the unbearable appearance of the Gorgon. In fact, we understand that the power of Medusa is not in how she is often depicted: as an enraged flash of lightning or a face laden with cruelty. Rather, her power lies in the eyes buried under the skin, in the skin deprived of warmth and shape, which when touched affords us a sense of both rigidity and softness, a feeling of sinking into a shapeless mass and a sensation of suspended floating on the surface.

We are as close as possible to a caress and we can be moved by this still trembling remainder of skin which has already become plastery and concealed itself beneath a chalky layer. We are as close as possible to a type of trust that we know will suck us towards drowning. It is disquieting, and it gives us what the French call “chair de poule” or “goose flesh” in English – an animality whose strangeness sticks to our skin. The emotion of the deep sea and the moon, the emotion of skin receiving a caress, a caress that is desired and feared, the emotion of something that goes too far, until it spills over into tears or anguish or into turmoil and the excess of pleasure that is only measured by the ability to touch the impossible and the unbearable. “Jelly” is the caress and the expression of the Medusa, her caressing expression, her absent, slippery expression on our face, an expression that both washes and freezes our face at the same time. 

Jean-Luc Nancy

(Translation: Julia Pound)

Materials: human hair, milk, cotton cloth, satin lining.

Dimensions: variable

Date: 2003

This work takes its title from a text by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des Images and the inscription he wrote on its inside cover.

This work is a reminiscence upon the time spent in a small studio with my daughters overlooking the Seine in Paris.  It is comprised of the remnants of memories, emotions, sensations, materials, and the often unnoticed traces of daily routines, actions and habits that shaped this time.   As such it bears more the sadness of a souvenir than the beauty of work of art.

These fragments, – the long dark hair collected from the hair brushes and sink each day, the frayed white satin lining of a summer dress, the tangled fibres and threads of a soft piece of cotton cloth, the puddle of milk – have been gathered, knotted and tied together, laid and poured out as a remapping of this site.  The lengths of entwined hair become a rosary of threaded moments, recollected and recited each time anew.   In sequence and repetition the knots trace the passages of time shared.  Now the remainder of these days, their residue of textures and gestures synthesise and accrue as images – images somatically imprinted.  This is then “for one who lives all the time there” the ground behind the image.

Exhibited in For Nothing, curated by Domenico De Clario,

26 November 2004 – 14 January 2005, The Bank, Midland, Western Australia.

Elizabeth Presa          “Milk River”  

October 18 – November 9, 2002

 

My sculptures are offered as readings of three texts published in French by Galilée: Fichus by Jacques Derrida, Papier Machine also by Jacques Derrida, and L’Intrus by Jean-Luc Nancy.

My readings become a making in which the material presence of the text emerges as an image, an accretion of simple gestures.  Gestures of pouring and dipping, washing, crushing, unfolding, threading and unthreading, binding and scrolling are repeated and multiplied in my studio by the Seine. These actions make visible a desire – my desire to draw in the words of these writers, in their language.  Here milk becomes a material and substance for sculpting;  a white illumination;  a way of feeding from a language whose mouth my mouth can hardly find.   Milk denotes a quiet and nauseous longing to drink from the richness of this language;  a longing spilling over time, continents and oceans that now fills this gallery.

Linden Gallery, Melbourne, 28 July – 12 August 2000

also exhibited in ‘Oblique Shadows: Asian Influences in Australian Sculpture’, Sculpture Square, Singapore, 2000.

Download: Kevin Hart’s text Horizons and Folds: Elizabeth Presa