offer me a little of what you’ve already lost (1999-2001)
In 1999, I began working on a body of work in which scant, stylised drawings – illustrations of massage positions – are surrounded by pages and pages in which the text is the drawing.
I’m not sure why I wanted the silly massage drawings there – two white gentlemen in suits performing it – but I did. There were, by the time the series ended a year later, about 150 sheets of matt A4 Montval paper: drawing as list making, text as drawing.
A range of exhortations, both fresh and clichéd, written in regular schoolgirl script with leaky watercolour, each incarnadine stroke as controlled and determined as I wished I could be.
The letters seem stitched together, red on white, and it is only now, so many years later, that it occurs to me that their form has a specific link to the accordion-folded Kamasutra given to me by a man with whom I was obsessed for some years, and who was the object of these futile, furious commands. Historically, the word Sutra – etymologically linked to the English suture – meaning string or thread, came to be used metaphorically to describe the stringing together of aphorisms into manuals. My collection of text drawings, then was nothing more nor less than a manual for behaving according to the contradictions of desire. A Kamasutra. The instructions are randomly ordered, or ordered only in accordance with the available space and a jagged, spoken lyricism. The adjacency of conflicting instructions provokes in me a shiver of tautological recognition: this is the condition I am, here, attempting to render.
Love, anguish, fury. Repetition as incantatory. An archive of impossible instructions.
Approximately 150 pieces, watercolour on Montval cold-pressed watercolour paper (300g), 21 x 29.7 cm each.
Exhibited at the RAM Foundation, Rotterdam, 2002.
