I wanted to play around with two liquids mixing/boundaries breaking down

I used the wax sculptures I’d made with glue and soap but I think it is more bodily than I intended. I am thinking about boundaries between other living things and humans mixing rather than showing a representation of the human body. Will try with liquid bioplastic (green colour) and perhaps a cast shape as container. I also recorded the process of pouring the liquids onto the containers but I think this would work better as the liquid coming from the ground like a spring as it was too obvious that someone was there engineering the motion of the liquids.

 

The Second Body – Daisy Hildyard

‘Elena Ferrante’s Nepolitican novels, a long work about the lives of two women who are born in southern Italy in the mid-twentieth century. One of these women, Lila, is strangely afflicted by an experience which she calls dissolving margins, or dissolving boundaries…. During these episodes, Lila perceives one thing in her surroundings bleeding into another, as the borders between entities break down.’ pg.35

‘She also sees these eroded boundaries around her, on earth. The central experience is of a solid physical body moving like liquid, or bleeding into another thing – a sense of boundaries inundated.’ pg.36

‘Lila has a vision of the human body that is so intense and so closes that she can see the bath of saliva which produces each word. Her disgust has something to do with the physicality: when she sees human bodies like this, they become indistinguishable from other bodies’ pg.37

‘The thing which is revealing itself is not physically perceptible, but is absolutely material. It breaks down the outlines of things at some granular, intangible scale. What it reveals to Lila is the terrifying sight of her brother’s body – a body which is intimate and familiar to her – as something which expands into the world around it.’ pg.37

‘For Clark it is a general point, an inundation of boundaries wherein traditional categories of accounting and explanation are called into question….. They both describe a condition in which the body has become estranged from itself, not conceptually or through fantasy, but literally and physically. The human body reaches physically into other things, and the boundaries between one thing and another collapse.’ pg.38

‘Lila says that her impression of disintegration is not a state of sickness but the way things are: for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials, a merging and mixing.’ Pg.38