Second Skin

I trace the contours of continuous changes in my body that overwhelm me.  Impregnated by nature’s design, it expands and contracts  releasing the scarlet fluid, the sacred waters cleansing the dirt and muck, preparing for another cycle of anticipation and pain. The body and mind remain in a constant state of fluctuation, in a state of ‘being’ never really comfortably embracing each cyclic change. I weave my dress, a second skin stained scarlet registering the change in its each loop connecting from one to the other like a shroud of ‘being’, a monument to the monumentality of change and its anxieties.

Life is replete with delayed or posthumous actions and lamentations. The Safety Shroud for a Lost Mother refers to an action or non- action with reference to an already lost opportunity for intervention. It references   the pain, loss and the guilt that manifests as a lamentation. In another interpretation, violence is denoted and futility of prevention comes as a procedure too delayed, that its presence now only remains as a reminder of a posthumous lamentation and a monument for guilt…or a cage for guilt where violence is still present.

The safety pins, woven together for the shroud, has a close affinity with dress-making and women’s garments used as a tool for holding, tightening, loosening and fastening.  It also has a potentiality for violence, a tool of defence and hidden macabre. The white garment underneath the shroud of safety pins plays the sense of purity, innocence, and veneration that is already violated.  The work oscillates between violence, safety, loss, guilt; it leaves an anxiety that is impregnated in the work unresolved.