bare breasts and bare souls

on thursday, we held an opening reception for our torso project. around 70 people stopped by to see the results. a friend came by, just as we were leaving, with an australian rotary exchange person in tow and i ended up staying another hour, talking to them and sharing a bottle of australian shiraz. it was, in all estimations, a success.

i still think the plain white torsos give the starkest, most artistic impression. but it's true that they are not autobiography in the same way as the others. the expression we individually chose was as unique as we ourselves are and somehow, seeing them all there, hanging together (they're suspended with wire and hanging on hangers), dismissed some of my earlier concerns about whether or not they are art. hanging there all together, representing some sense of community and fellowship and womanhood, it didn't matter anymore whether they are art or not.

i am one of the few who included a look towards the future in the way i chose to express myself at this moment. the sewn paper garland hanging on the inside is my bucket list. it contains goals both lofty (publish a book) and not-so-lofty (befriend a fox).

many of the others covered theirs in photos of their friends and family. despite the central importance of photography to me, i did not want to use photos on mine. i chose instead drawings of places and things that are important to me (chicago, moscow, copenhagen, macedonia) and cameras. there are a few helleristning, because i love those and find deep meaning in their simple lines.

probably most important are the newspaper words that are underneath - both visible and not visible. mostly in danish, mostly because those are the newspapers i had at hand, but expressing fragments of sentiments like "seeking authenticity" and "can the danes be changed in 5 minutes?" and "abnormal is the new normal" and "men are from mars, women from venus, children from heaven and bush is from a very ugly place filled with fear and punishment." that one i'd been saving for awhile.

as agreed, my birth certificate is there, on the inside and you'd have to know what it looks like in order to find it. mine is painted that same blue - a sort of julie blue - inside and out and it somehow represents a kind of peacefulness to me. i also spritzed it with my favorite perfume of the moment (sisley no. 2), so my torso is even scented. each torso is as unique as can be, expressing something meaningful to each of us, but also transmitting meaning to those who come to look. it is an intimate, personal exhibition, letting all of the imperfections quite literally hang out for all to see, but also presenting a coherent whole somehow. a little window into our individual souls, as expressed on our very bodies. pretty powerful stuff, actually.

finishing my torso (for now)

we're going to show our torsos this thursday with a big opening splash! so i've been frantically working on finishing mine. it's been sitting there on the sideboard, covered in words, painted blue, but unfinished.  i know i want to somehow incorporate some feathers, but i don't know yet how - perhaps this little feather bouquet i found on the beach contains an answer to that.

otherwise, i've been sketching and painting some small drawings of places i love and places which have been influential in my life to decorate the torso. this is the church of sv. jovan kaneo (john the baptist, if i remember correctly) at lake ohrid. influential since i met husband in macedonia, tho' not in ohrid.

st. basil's to signify my russian soul. i sketched or printed old sketches onto some pages from an old encyclopedia - that way the pictures still incorporate words, as words are important to my conception of my torso (and thus myself).

i couldn't resist using the colorful houses of nyhavn in copenhagen to represent denmark, which has, you may imagine, become an enormous influence upon me, having lived here for 15 years now. i loved those colorful houses along the canal when i first visited and seeing them still makes me smile.

and chicago, a sort of composite of places and buildings and that chicago pizza. it's the place from which i jumped off to my life in europe, so it had to be there.

and i couldn't resist a few helleristninger (nordic petroglyphs). they just speak to my soul. i drew them with that fabulous payne's grey ink.

i love this circle of life helleristning. it's long been a favorite. and symbolizes a feeling of community that spans the world (and which centers on this blog in many ways). it is essential to include on my torso.

these were some new helleristning that i came across that i'd never seen before. i love how the one figure appears to be floating away on a balloon. that felt symbolic and important as well. and in general i love that circle with the cross inside - it's the nordic sun symbol. light is so important in this part of the world, that it had to be included.

it is once again evident to me that i am a person in need of a deadline. i'd been procrastinating working on this and tho' i've thought about it pretty much endlessly, nothing was happening on it. but now, when the exhibition looms, ideas are coming together. i came across a package of little bitty people that i found in an antique store in the US last summer and i thought that since i've not used any photos of husband and sabin, that i'd use some little bitty figures to signify them. i included sabin's lost twin as well, because she's also part of who i am.

funny how once you start working, you get in a state of flow and ideas come and things just begin to happen. a garland on which i've written a bucket list to decorate the hanger. in that flow, i hit upon a way to incorporate a few feathers, which i seem to collect wherever i go.

i don't think i will be able to declare my torso officially finished on thursday when it goes to the exhibition, but it will be finished enough to show. i suspect that i will continue adding to it and it will change and grow evolve. just like me.

seeking inspiration in saul steinberg's work

as i move to the next stage of decorating my torso (it's finally the color i want it to be - funnily enough, based on leftover paint from my beloved blue room), i find myself turning to saul steinberg. a jew who fled europe in the years leading to WWII, he became the quintessential new yorker and was, for years, a cartoonist at the new yorker.

i'm drawn to his simple lines, his use of rubber stamps, his clever fingerprints, his small topographies and the way in which he mixes styles. especially that last bit.

i do like to draw and mostly i draw plants and feathers, but also buildings - barns and houses. i had a couple of steinberg's books from the library a couple of months ago and i snapped these iPhone shots of the things i wanted to save.

there's something about me and inspiration and i never know when i will actually use it, but i am a compulsive collector of things which inspire. but, if you've been coming around here any length of time,  or follow any of my 119 pinterest boards, you know that.

i love this passport photo steinberg made with his own fingerprints. a passport is an identifying document, and what could be more identifying than a fingerprint. it's genius.

this seems to have been made of spilled ink - i love the notion that something artistic and beautiful can come of a mistake and i imagine being able to use that on my torso somewhere.

here's some of that mixed style i was referring to - all within one piece. the man in the middle is my favorite. people aren't really something that i draw much, but i'd like to try something like that.

i love the way these small, disparate drawings are connected by ladders and stairs, it has an autobiographical ring to it that i think will be perfect on my torso.

and a collection of meaningful objects - this is the kind of thing i draw in my art journals - just collections of the random things which are lying around the house.

and this use of rubber stamps in an unexpected fashion just speaks to me. i guess i'd better get to work.

what/who is inspiring you?

is this art? a torso project update

it's time for a little torso project update. some of the creative women from the original torso project weekend met up yesterday to show their finished products/works in progress and to discuss next steps towards showing the work.

the end results are as diverse as the women themselves. as i see it, the common thread for all is autobiography. these casts of our very bodies, frozen in a moment in time, are the canvas for a snapshot of all that we feel has made us who we are, right here and right now.

words, photos, maps, yarn, paint, drawings, color - all have been used to depict the individual lives of each of us. how we see ourselves and how we imagine that others see us. these torsos hold fragments of our memories, our lives, our documents, our experiences. they are there, written on our very bodies.

but i find myself thinking about whether they are art. we used artistic techniques - collage, paint, photography, one person even "drew" in yarn, as you can see above - but did we achieve actual art?  which raises the more complicated question of what is art anyway? it's a bit like that old joke about pornography, "i know it when i see it." and i can't help but think that what we made wasn't art per se.

but if it's not art, then what is it? it is expressive. and highly personal. it is storytelling. and a bit of art therapy, in that i think we all found it therapeutic to look within for our memories and stories. but to ask a museum to display our work would be a stretch. a big one. maybe it would be different if yoko ono or madonna had been part of our project - they would lend caché and would have perhaps lifted us all in our visions and our work. one of the most powerful things we did yesterday was that each person shared the thoughts behind their torso. and it made them so much more meaningful to hear people's stories.  but art needs to be able to stand alone, as we can't stand them beside at an exhibition and explain them to people.

but the fact is that we are a bunch of creative people in a little town in the middle of nowhere in denmark who happen to have tried to tell a little piece of the story of who we are in the form of a plaster cast of our own bodies. and while a few members of the group are trained as artists, as a whole we are not. we are teachers and office workers and librarians and nurses and consultants and physical therapists and prison guards. and those are wonderful things to be.

what we had was an amazing experience - to make those torsos together in a room of 20+ women. baring ourselves (literally) and opening up our hearts and experiences and stories and sharing them is a powerful thing, a wild woman sisterhood sort of thing. but where do we go with it? we are going to exhibit them locally at the end of august, but i wonder beyond that. they might fit well in a library exhibition, connected to other forms of autobiography, or to part of a storytelling conference. but i honestly don't think we'll convince a museum or a gallery to show them.

here's mine, i'm not done yet. it's filled with words that resonated with me - many in danish, because those are the newspapers that i have at hand. i've given those words first a wash of sepia, followed by a a wash of watered down paynes grey ink, as i don't want to completely cover them. tho' i do intend to cover them to an extent with small paintings and drawings of places and memories that are important to me. but mine isn't art either, but it is a personal expression of me. words are important to me. as is expressing myself. right now, it's darker and more foreboding than i actually feel, which is interesting, but doesn't reflect the hazy vision of it that resides in my head. and that's a big part of the process too.

certifying identity

i've not done a whole lot more on my torso since the weekend of the project. something holds me back, tho' i think about it all the time. i think i fear a little bit that i'll not be able to tap into that energy that arose when the group was together, working on the same thing when i'm at home all alone. but i also have been busy with other things and i do have faith that it will come in good time.

the only "requirement" of the project was that we all place a copy of our birth certificate on the back of the torso, so they would have that one element of commonality when we exhibit them. all along, i've been quite uncomfortable with that notion on some intuitive level that i can't really articulate. i have a feeling of it as some kind of official stamp (of approval? existence?) that i find doesn't really have a place in how i envision myself at this moment in time - the torso is, after all, a self-portrait.

then, i came across a passage in harold rosenberg's book about saul steinberg. he says, "official documents are among the most stylized elements in modern society. passports, drivers' licenses, bonding stamps, ID cards change very little." and it hit me that this has something to do with my objection to affixing my birth certificate to the torso. you see, i've changed a lot since then. and although it's arguably a formal trace of myself, i object on some gut level to the formality of it - to the official stamp of existence of it, to the unchangeability of it.

perhaps it also has something to do with the issue of displacement, which i have often pondered and which is in my consciousness again as i read salman rushdie's joseph anton biography.  i have chosen to live outside the country of my birth and that causes a rift with my old identity. identity is often grounded in place and time and people and work and when all of those change, you do too. in forging a new one (that is never truly of the new place you've chosen either), you leave behind some of the old, breaking with it. i think that documentation of identity represented by a birth certificate is too strong a reminder of that break. and leaves me acutely conscious that i am cast adrift somewhere in the mid-atlantic - neither fully here nor there.

so my birth certificate is there, on the inside. but in the end, it will probably be mostly covered over - hidden beneath, forming the foundation of the layers, but changed by what comes after. and perhaps that's as powerful a statement as displaying it for all to see.

exposed!

what a weekend! i stepped over my own boundaries, overcame my own fears, bonded with new people and became closer to some who were already friends, learned that nobody has a perfect body and began work on what is, for me, a major piece of autobiographical art. it was the weekend of the torso project.

probably the best part was selecting the headlines i wanted to swathe myself in.

i've come to feel rather not particularly american after nigh on 15 years of living outside the country of my birth.  but there are still moments when i am deeply, culturally bound by my heritage - like at the thought of standing topless and (gasp!) braless and allowing someone who i just met to cover me in plaster. i actually had nightmares about it two nights before it happened. a streak of deep conservatism surfaces within me and i'll admit feeling some measure of resentment for it, even while i am utterly helpless against it. but i took a deep breath and swallowed my fears (after expressing them and laughing quite a lot about them (for which i am grateful to those who helped me do that)).

between the future and the past - could it be more appropriate?

but when it came down to it and women around the room (24 of them), working in pairs, shed their tops and stood there in all of their real glory, it was actually quite ok. and despite having someone else drape strips of plaster on my entire upper body (the kind casts are made of when you have a broken arm), it was both intimate and not. because it was also a chemical process (plaster gets warm as it hardens), and a logistical puzzle - placing the strips so they clung to one another and built the next layer. it began to harden quickly and felt more like a suit of armor than something particularly intimate (which perhaps also bears reflection).

travel-related on the inside - political on the outside.

in the end, standing there exposed and as real as it gets was quite ok. and it was an amazing experience - intimate and fun and full of laughter and expressions of fears and creativity and excitement. and my goodness, what an experience it was. to be lived and felt and shared.

i covered the inside with travel-related headlines and bits of news stories - as i am formed by travel, perhaps most of all. the outside is quite political, but also contains inside jokes - like a cartoon about facebook drawn by my friend political cartoonist jens hage - who loves breasts and who i stuck right there on my own breast, in a kind of gesture of love and abiding friendship. a joke of the kind he will appreciate.

i've only just begun decorating it. it will be interesting to see where it takes me. it has only begun to whisper to me of where it wants to go. stay tuned.

and if you'd like to gather a group of women (you by no means need to have 24 of them) and do something similar, perhaps with an eye on a global exhibition - shoot me an email (jknachti (at) gmail (dot) com).

in the company of women

our torso project approaches. 26 women. a shitload of plaster for casts. nudity. breasts. i'm both excited and worried. honestly, there will be no hiding. i'm not super fond of my body. and it's going to be cast in plaster for all to see. and for posterity. and let's face it, gravity isn't kind. and i'm not getting any younger (tho' i did recently realize that i've thought, for nearly a year, that i was already thirty-sixteen and it turns out that i will only be that on march 22. however, i'm not sure at this age that it makes that much difference.

but i'm looking forward to the laughter and high spirits that will undoubtedly ensue on friday afternoon and most of saturday. bonding. laughter. art. in the company of women. they all have breasts too. and they're undoubtedly about as fond of theirs as i am of mine.

if you were going to pick music for such an event, what would it be?

the torso project

i need a boost of positive energy after the day i've had (tales of troglodytes and deeply unprofessional and unserious and manipulative behavior, which i will process a bit more for myself before i share), so i would like to share an amazing project i'm going to be part of at the beginning of march.  it's called kvindeportrætter (women's portraits) 30 women (some artists, some not) will gather and make a plaster cast of our very own torsos. afterwards, we will decorate them as we wish - collage, paint, whatever - telling the stories of ourselves and our lives. 

aside from the torso mold, which makes me a little light-headed when i think about it (there will be nowhere to hide), i can't wait! it's running in the back of my mind, the things with which i want to adorn my own torso - tickets i've been saving, interesting articles, snippets of text, something along the lines of a gift i once received from a friend, perhaps some stitching or stones or driftwood. it feels delicious with possibilities. and the sense of community of two days spent with like-minded creative women - just the thought of it gives me a sense of calm and a feeling of happiness that i was much in need of at the moment.

this torso in the photographs was made by the woman who will lead the project. she did it in the context of an art relay - where they artists were to make a piece of art, then send some piece of it on to another. they would also receive a piece of another's art and have to incorporate it into theirs. the triangle in the center was what she sent on. and the little doll hanging inside is related to what she received, as is the red color of the inside. she said there wasn't a single piece on it that isn't laden with meaning. 

isn't that awesome?

i'm so happy to be finding the artistic community i was missing. i will share more once it gets underway. the results will be exhibited locally and in a real art museum. but more about that as it happens. in the meantime, here's the pinterest board where i'm saving my inspiration.