histérica
In the ’90s, Elaine Showalter revisited the concept of hysteria and called it a protolanguage, communicating through the body messages that could not be verbalized. “Histérica” is a series of tapestries in this language that comes before any language: what are the silenced symbols and archetypes we carry within us and what do they look like? I attempt to uncover what lies underneath through a physical, aggressive process that in itself replicates symptoms of hysteria, using a tufting gun and other needles to stab and punch fabric with yarn repeatedly in an intuitive, exploratory process that is chaotic and cathartic.
I created these pieces using a gun––a tufting gun––along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, I conjured vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation.
The resulting images are hysterical—in the truest sense of the word. Liberated from its slanderous connotations, hysteria is understood as a manifestation of the unconscious ferociously unbound. Ruptures are reborn as rugs, inviting the viewer into the home within.
Hysteria comes to us by way of ancient Greek from the root hystera, meaning uterus, and was associated, by philosophers Plato and Aretaeus, as a “wandering womb”. The uterus was thought to have a separate life within the woman: “an animal within an animal.” The womb migrated around the body, drawn by pleasant smells or repelled by foul ones, ignited passions, inflamed tempers, and caused sickness and overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess. Even as medical developments have advanced and hysteria has less to do with its uterine namesake, my latest works have all the connotations of the feminine mind compelled by an insubordinate body, the displacement of order by a bodily revolt.
Emerging from the obsessive medical discourse of the body and mind, I transfigure the “hysterics” of the body, unlocking the secrets of the mind and manifests them into strange vivid beasts hidden within the cave of human consciousness, the roving creatures at the center of women, a manifestation of historical references to the bizarre and the divine, the sacred and the profane. One such monstrous creature of inspiration includes the oddly torsoless Baubo, a bawdy, sexually liberated Orphic goddess referenced in the large-scale tufted wall piece “histérica #7, Baubo (hysterical #7, Baubo)”.