Today I hung the cervitaurs for the first time.
Until this morning, they lived on the work benches, in pieces, surrounded by scraps and contact cement. There, they felt provisional and clearly made with EVA foam, tape, glue, and covered in pattern markings cutlines and redrawn seams. They had a distant logic I could think of critically, like theory. I could see all my decisions, mistakes, revisions and negotiations. They read a lot more like constructions rather than bodies.
Once I lifted them, the shift was immediate.
Their weight reorganizes them. Their necks tilt and their shoulders drop In their new arrangement and their legs lose function. Gravity stopped being background idea and became active. Like an object drawn has a soul when you give it a shadow, gravity brought in something very real. What I’m looking at now no longer feels like a sculpture in progress. It reads as a suspended body and I wasn’t prepared for my own visceral response to this. I was horrified. What am I doing? What Have I done?
At this stage nothing is finished and the hanging was meant as a practical structural stress test. Will the antlers support the weight of the sculpture though the wire frame, shoulder supports and headplate? There is nothing to distract from what is happening mechanically. I’m still able to think of them in clearer terms.
Soon these bodies will be covered in fabric and beadwork and embroidery and colour and pattern will slow the eye. I find myself thinking about what happens when surface arrives and begins to reorganize how the work is read. Right now, the violence is direct. It does not rely on interpretation. If someone walked into the studio today, they would understand what they were seeing without explanation. I wonder if this understanding will survive the next phase of making. I’m playing with the aesthetics of beauty and violence, camp and the abject.
Western visual culture is full of moments where harm and elegance sit side by side. We see in in religious paintings, myths and hunting imagery. Bodies are injured, punished, or killed, but rendered masterfully with detail and skill. The damage remains, but it is shaped into something that can be held. Something we can look at.
What interests me is how long someone stays with an image once it becomes pleasurable to look at.
Hunting culture understands this instinctively. The trophy – an animal valued for its parts - is cleaned, shaped, positioned into something aesthetically pleasing. All the blood and guts are removed. The moment of killing is displaced and far removed by the sanitized presentation. What remains fits comfortably into a room, frozen in time and is often accompanied by a tale of bravery and bravado.
Working with textiles and ornament is not a way of softening what these bodies have undergone. It is a way of tracking how violence becomes acceptable when it is carefully presented. These cervitaurs are not aggressive figures. They are slight and youthful. Their bodies suggest movement rather than strength. These beings danced, skipped, felt joy, wonder and walked lightly on the earth. Hanging them is not about drama or glamour. It is about exposure. So much harm depends on turning lives into abstractions. I’m hoping this come through clearly for the viewer.
Some will say the work feels uneasy because it is beautiful and that’s a useful response. It points to an expectation that harm should appear a certain way in order to be recognized. If these bodies were grotesque, viewers would look away and move on. But we don’t do this with violent religious paintings. We look through the violence and find the beauty in the artwork as an object. Beauty numbs us to violence. It is later, at home or in a quiet moment that the memory of these violent acts resurfaces in the mind and we recognize how subversive beauty can be or rather how beauty can be a tool the subvert violence — to get it in through the back door.
This work is not about a single act of violence. It is about how violence persists through repetition, presentation, and ritual, specifically within intergenerational homo-social hegemony among men. These are learned behaviours.
I am aware, that without ornamentation, this violence is the most legible it may ever be. I am trying to hold onto that awareness as the work moves forward.