Sangeeta Sandrasegar

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

This self-portrait completes a cycle of semi-self portraits I have made over the past 2 years. By which I realise now has been a critical self-evaluation of a ‘home-coming’.
I finished this piece thinking of the following passage from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

A Maenad had a fawn tattooed on her soft, bare right arm. She was breast-feeding a fawn, stroking and playing with it. Then she grabbed it, tore it to pieces, and sank her teeth into the still pulsing flesh. Why this sequence? And why must this sequence forever take the form of a sudden raptus, when really it was a ceremony? … Altarless, she wandered through the trees. Dismembering the fawn, the Maenad dismembered herself, possessed by the god. Hence, in devouring the fawn she devoured the god, mixed in its blood. She who was possessed thus tried herself to possess a part of the god. But what happened afterward? A great silence. The sultry heat of the woods. Strips of bleeding flesh glimpsed through the leaves. The god wasn’t there. Life – incomprehensible, opaque.

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite Corpse

“ … What excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone, and that they were endowed with a much greater leeway, which cannot be too highly valued by poetry …With the Exquisite Corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity … Along the way a considerable enigma arose, posed by the frequent encounter of elements with similar associational origins in the course of the collective production … This encounter not only provoked a vigorous play of often extreme discordances, but also supported the idea of communication between the participants—tacit, but in waves…”

André Breton, Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, exhibition catalogue, La Dragonne, Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris, 7-30 October, 1948.

Installation View: Death Be Kind

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Over the course of about 6-7 months from mid last year to the beginning of 2011 I worked on the following collaborative project with my dear friend and artist Luke Parker. We sent work back and forth between Melbourne and Sydney where Luke lives. The works were made for a show at the project space Death Be Kind:

Exquisite Corpse the exhibition is a meeting place between the aesthetics of the fictional and the real, centred around the narrative of the body. Parker and Sandrasegar's visual narratives conjure the body politic via collaborative collages with global references and Porter brings together images of the corpse, both photographed and collected from his taxonomical project The Porter Archive.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar and Luke Parker's collaborative work Exquisite Corpse follows the principles of the Surrealist drawing game (c.1925), which in turn stemmed from the word based Victorian parlour game, Consequences. Made across Sydney and Melbourne, each work was authored in alternating steps: head/upper torso/lower torso-legs/legs-feet. Each ‘body-part’ was concealed from view of the recipient save for a sliver — a glimpse at the point of connection for the following element. The works unite the artists subtle approach to materials and presentation, and the figurative imagery is both reverent and funny.

Exquisite corpse Untitled30

mixed papers, watercolour, sequins

96 x 27cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled23

mixed papers, watercolour, transfer

66 x 33cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled25

mixed papers, watercolour

64 x 19cm

Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled27
mixed papers, watercolour
25 x 13cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled29
mixed papers, watercolour, pantone
58.5 x 34cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandasegar
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled16
mixed papers, watercolour
42 x 37cm
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Installation View: Death Be Kind
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

May already

I realise it's May and I haven't added any new work yet!

Just in case to give you an idea of what I have been up to this year here is a link to a recent interview I did for a local magazine.

So far this year just been getting concepts in order, having failures and mini-successes. Did a residency at 1 Shanthi Road in Bangalore (amazing) through an Asialink Grant and then several weeks traveling through India - (well the major cities) it was beyond expectations. I will get the latest projects up soon - so please stay tuned for the start of 2011 on this blog!

all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights 2005

dimensions variable

calico, cotton, watercolour, pearl beads

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

This is a life-size self-portrait made primarily in response to a paper prize exhibition. I thought I would be disgustingly grotesque and spew forth paper as painted, penciled, cut, sculpted, glued and stuck. The piece extends upon themes I have been exploring in recent work since my return to Melbourne (Australia) after about 5 years away. It is an acute contemplation of my self and of the adjustments we make to ourselves in our departures from or re-arrivals to place. In making the work I was heavily upon two poems by Sylvia Plath Tulips and Mushrooms. My thoughts were slightly absurd and oddly familiar, I had studied these poems in VCE literature, such a distance in time, between that past me and who I am: how I read then and how I read now.

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

DETAIL

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

I have spent and continue to look for ways of redefining the shadow metaphor in our western culture – as motif, as a word as an image – particularly as a way. As a way to define the in-between places of our Western - Eastern cultures and collisions. To define the hybrids, the half-castes and the half way there’s we keep getting towards. I disabuse it. The shadow I believe is a contemporary cultural icon able to represent for us the shifts and difficulties and mergers of our contemporary nowadays world. And I still feel my work will continue to do this – keep searching out, keep looking, as long as I can continue to do this, keep looking, keep searching out. But every so often I get tired of this. I get tired of myself and I see myself flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow. And every so often this thing that I keep working towards and for, I use it against myself. To do injury. And so five years ago – I was half sick of shadows. And I take this icon that I spend so much time looking towards, badly. I misuse it. And I take the worst of our cultures, of our hate and fear and mistrust of shadows – of others - and use it against myself. I turn myself into myself. And look at this other mirror of me.

The Leiomano Series

Fragments of a lullaby no.1
Supa Cloth, thread, glass and plastics beads, pompoms
Dimensions Variable
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

The leiomano series of works came about as a response to a fundraising auction held by the Marine Conservation Society of Australia, and as such, thinking about the concerns and issues paramount to the Society.

I was drawn to the leiomano of various Polynesian communities: weapons and tools made both utilitarian and decorative by the use of sharks’ teeth. These objects are products of piscatorial societies that lived in unison with the seas. They are representative of a time and people, which respected and revered the abyssal power of our planets’ oceans – a source that fed and nourished but which would also take away.

At night I am kept awake dreaming of boats, and ships and liners, criss-crossing the waters of our globe, transporting their cargoes of import/export food furniture post drunken P&O singles marines cars, and I think of all the life that is destroyed in the wake of our passages – sea kill.

These contemporary leiomano are child-like rattles toys, inversions of the old and knowledgeable ways of living – they are new talismans for future generations.

Will we? Will our children grow up to live play and learn the respect we need to continue living and surviving sustainably? We need to bring back those Gods of the seas; kamohoalii, dakuwaqa - those pelagic protectors of the Deep Triton speared planetary Neptune - to protect our Oceans for the future, both from and for ourselves.

These collections of leiomano are like fragments of songs – of lullabies and nursery rhymes. Half – remembered, half sung. Half-found. Half-heard.

These collections of leiomano are like fragments seen and displayed in museums. Artefact. Artifice. Remembrances remnants of something past. Pieces of a déjà-vu – something vital within us.

In these pastel hues, these songs, these memories are the links that tie us to one another, that tie us to the seas that we travel. These rivers of love that swirl around us and in which we swim, these oceans that lap back and forth. Ebb and flow and the tides of giving and taking – we must remember. Rediscover.

Somewhere else lurking within these toys made from tools, there lies too the fierceness of love, the desire to protect and to guard at all costs.

Requiem for Sofia
Supa cloth, glas and plastic beads, acrylic string
Dimensions variable
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Fragments of a lullaby no.3

Supa Cloth, thread, glass and plastics beads, pompoms

Dimensions Variable

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Fragments of a lullaby no.2

Supa Cloth, thread, glass beads

Dimensions Variable

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Its feet were tied with a silken thread of my own hand's weaving

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

This series is a heady and heat-felt contemplation about my return to Melbourne (Australia) after about 5 years away from the country. In the adjustments we make to ourselves in our returns to, or re-arrivals to place – the decisions, thoughts and feelings which mingle so confusingly and heart-'achingly' in our assessments or re-assessments.

In a way, primarily it is about love - the ties that bind - yearning and obligation, to place and to people.

In constructing these pieces there were two poems that I was thinking upon He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats; and I had a dove, and the sweet dove died by John Keats, a line from which lends itself as the title to this project.

In the works I quote Australian flora. And the panels of organza, for me, evoke the colours of this country, those brilliant hues that can be washed out in the stark, drenching light of our skies and then also the ghost-like softness of certain hours. Referring to my practice (the use of henna and cultural motifs) the decorations of these hanging feet are those of the Australian bush. Most of the floral designs are homage’s (quotes) to the water colours of Ellis Rowan, a Victorian naturalist and illustrator, in many ways a forerunner in the campaign and representation of Australian flora and fauna in applied arts and visual identity.

In the other panels there are the Coolabah, a ghost gum and the wait-a-while (a cane vine that grows through northern Queensland – with its spike encrusted tendrils that catch you out as you trawl through the bush). In these panels there are the lost places of this country, and the lost souls – our cultural nostalgia for a kind of heroic failure. There is the song of the swaggie, and the ghosts of those intrepid explorers who never came back. (The Coolabah I quote is the iconic tree where Burke and Wills missed the meeting point, and the hidden store of supplies.) In the contemplation of naming and place (and of the original owners of this country) there is the eternal creation, the blue skies of the dessert plains and Sydney. The 'everywhen' - the dreaming - and this speaks to all of us about the places we take or return to.

The work From this place depicts the Waratah flower. During federation it battled against the wattle to become our national flower. We take the word from the Aboriginal Eora language group. The word Eora (Iora, Iyora) literally translates as "Here" or “From this place”. When Europeans first encountered the local people around Botany Bay; questioning who they were they commonly replied Eora – from this place.

...Beloved as they are, from this place, they hang here, Myrtle, Jasmine, and many more... (which reminds me also of two novels by Toni Morrison Beloved and Love)