Biography
Rooted in corporeal experience, my visual art practice examines the body in relation to states of absence. I employ the performative body to revel in questions surrounding a potential disappearance of the Self. By capturing and rendering the mis-en-scène of the body loosing itself in the landscape, it is my aim to render tangible the ontological phenomenon of presence and absence. By the creation of installations in video, performance and sculpture, my work becomes visual articulations of loss, lack and limitation.
By situating the body in relation to architecture, my intention is to witness the moment when the distinction between the two no longer exists. Having a performance-based practice rooted in sculpture implies that these gestures/actions/poses are site-specific and negotiate space with the same sensitivity of installation art. Through my practice, I have come to understand the body as architecture, body as an allocation of space.
As a sort of veil, my visual works envelop the body in loss and grief shielding it from the gaze. By using the body as expressive tool, material, I interrogate the desire for continuance despite bodily degradation, the rupture of Self between physic and psychic and the aesthetic blur between subject and object. These performance-based site-specific video installations, a sculpture and an audio installation will visually present the flesh of a being as a vestige, framed at the threshold of existence.
The exhibition aspires to explore what is not and what is no longer.
By framing a ritual gesture in which the figure risks loosing the self to the resistance against loss, lack, death, I am appropriating the idea and iconography of a momento mori. The works birthed of this imagery, strive to unearth the sensory body and allow it to suspend between existence and disappearance with the use of duration stimulating a critical and emotive response that resides in space and context.
The image of performance, in my practice, visually illustrates the relationship of the artist with bodily limitations. The works materialize the body’s limits that enter the discourse of our cultural fabric composed of archetypes and symbols. Through still-life and tableau-vivant and yet neither one nor the other, my works present the act of absencing to visually form not the loss of the figure, nor the death to this figure but rather the death within; the death that composes the figure. My intention is toward a valued, more grounded understanding of the atrophied nature of my own female body.
Faye Mullen
