Five Pieces

Sophie Milner

The Situation

SOME PEOPLE GET very nervous about the stillness of the situation. It’s not the kind of stillness you find in the natural world, although some may argue that everything is derived from the natural, and distinctions between man-made and natural environments are arbitrary on analysis. Nonetheless, it is possible to construct a situation where a person feels cut off from all other living species. Walls do this well. They barrier the senses from things beyond them. You can touch a wall, but you can’t touch beyond it. You can see a wall, but you can’t see through it. You can smell a wall, but you can’t smell the other side. The only sense that might be stimulated from beyond a well made wall is the auditory. That’s why you will find some people with their ears against these walls. They are trying to sense what lies beyond them. And when they can’t, some people get very nervous about the  stillness of the situation. 

Cubist Self Portrait 

She began with a surgical cut on the left side of her temple, along her hairline, and used her fingernails to pull back the skin, which she carefully pinned behind her ear. The fold was delicate, like the innards of a rose, and she felt a surge of adrenaline at the immediate destabilising effect it had on her symmetry. The facets of her cheeks, covering the muscles of her smile, caught her attention next, and she dealt with these until they were antithetical to one another and no longer adhered to the readings of linear perspective, their overlapping planes a visual curiosity from multiple angles. The mapping of her facial geometry led her to her nasal cartilage, that now loomed over more distinct than ever. She hesitated around its rims. The left ear was lowered, the right repositioned on the left to create the illusion of a time-lapse; the dynamism of the superimposed. Last came her eyes, corpuscular as her eyeballs now seemed. These two tools of the three-dimensional field, sacrificed with a final incision, a singular straight line extending deep into the non representational.

Body Sites 

The curator offered me latex gloves. Before the offer, I had not considered touching the work. After the offer, which felt more like a direction, I could think of nothing else. Yet I was afraid the gloves would change the communication of touch between myself and the work. One cannot touch and not be touched in return, and the language of touch is often one of intentions. So, what would come of my intentions, distorted by covered fingers, would there be a mishandling of the work by my hands, a violation of the invisible code of touch? I envisaged the minute contortions to its shape the moment I were to take its weight into my own; the mutual acknowledgement between myself and the work that its own intentions could not be heard. And after, my apology to the curator that this had never happened before, as I looked down at the objects retort, its ruined edges conveying its own language: material, consequential, communicated with markings of an irreversible exchange.

An Invitation For Lifting

A woman stands in front of a bathroom mirror. White walls, grey slate tiles, the main distinguishing feature of the room is this single large sheet of mirror, cut and cemented directly onto the wall above the sink, reflecting the upper half of the bathroom, the upper half of her naked self, back at her. She leans to pick the cat up, its front legs reaching up towards her as she cups its armpits; an invitation for lifting. The image cuts at their waists. A diagonal of fur, a sash of burnt sugar. Her naked form abstracted by fur, its form now functioning as a garment of kinds. She thinks of hunters with their wall trophies, outworn fur collars made of fox tail, zipped suit bags in garage storage. She thinks of eroticism within image making; the concealed over the revealed. If only she could zip and unzip her body like a garment of fur. She turns to her side, they are both watching themselves in the mirror now. She knows that this image will not last long.

The Boss

(After the Kaleidoscope Series of Damien Hirst)

WHEN THE BOSS is around we all work a little bit harder. The strips of wax paper are cut a bit faster, the moulds are sealed a bit tighter, and we are all a bit more careful not to damage the wings. The Blues and Brimstones are easy to catch and pin, due to the size of their thorax, so when the boss is around we focus on those, filling up the spreading boards easy. The bright yellow of the male Brimstones tend to feature in the larger works with more dots to fill. The boss is very particular about these works, they only leave the factory once their insurance has come through. The Coppers and Hairstreaks don’t take well to the spade tip forceps so you have to be more careful when you slide their bodies down the pins. A lot of this work is about good levelling but people wouldn’t know that. You can really mess up the metallics of the Swallowtails and Allies if you don’t get your levelling right. Certain iridescences require certain resins to hold their colour correct. If a wing breaks whilst the resin is half set there’s no saving the work. Unless the resin is opaque, then you can push the body under, place another on top, but you’ve got to work fast and it usually doesn’t work. It’s not something you’d do when the boss is around. I keep a stash of extra wings in a folded triangle of parchment paper in my overall pocket for moments like these. I’ve never had to use them, but I like to know they are there.