Natasha Burbury
Bachelor of Fine Arts
The thoughts of the living are herd by the dead
The body of work addresses mother nature’s capacity to completely control and dominate a life during pregnancy. The self portrait recalls the complications that occurred during my own birth, drawing from a personal reaction to being a twinless twin. Experimenting with materials to discover why in some cases this natural shapeshifting experience causes death instead of life? Extracting ideas from theories of psychoanalyst and philosopher, Julia Kristeva; who considers the place of the maternal body as a place of ‘splitting’, ‘threshold’, a place where nature confronts culture.
Using a combination of painting and living sculpture, the project is a self portrait accompanied with my interpretation and emotional reaction to my still born twin. The work uses symbolism to address mother natures unpremeditated domination over the mother itself- being human. The living sculpture operates as natures umbilical cord, giving ‘life’ to only half of the self portrait. I have also included my own hair and pubic hair acting as a defiant characteristic of myself also representing life. Within my response to the still born twin there is no defining characteristics not even an acceptance of gender specifics. The response is an intimate reaction to the situation in order to find acceptance of the death. Trying to understand that at the end of the day nature dominates the decision of what is to live and what is to die.
Inspired by sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere exhibition we are all flesh, who distorts the body with twigs in order to depict metamorphosis. The work calls upon techniques of Egon Schiele who finds connections between the human body and impulses in plants and Austrian symbolist painter Gustave Klimt sensibility in relation to natural surroundings and natural behavior.
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