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| Radium Nouns - Liz Collini |
A collaboration in progress: Liz Collini & Lindsay Simons
a non-linear process of experimentation and exploration; ideas converge and diverge; works emerge and resolve at different times and speeds; the collaboration is as yet unfinished
Lindsay largely works in oils; these pieces take time and patience to layer up and complete; Liz mostly makes works on paper, quicker to produce
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| Erythraen Sibyl Head - Lindsay Simons |
We've shared a studio for around 5 years and over time we have talked about the differences in our work but also some significant similarities;
an interest in reworking classical themes and subjects; timelessness; references from history/art history; an editing of subject/imagery to a central visual core; an exploration of what we find beautiful
We began to think about the ancient sibyls as a source from which to spark new ideas;
female figures representing power and agency; writing, speaking; the leaves as carriers of prophesies; our own place as women entering our ‘third’ age
The painted figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling gave us a starting point and led us to mythology and folk tales (via Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde);
tellers of stories, bringers of news, seers of the future; the crone and the fairy godmother;
Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book XIV; the sibyl in the bottle, the sibyl in the bottle in the cave
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid offered another set of prompts; Aeneas meets the Cumaean Sibyl and is taken to the underworld, eventually reaching the Elysian Fields and meeting his dead father;
how many versions, how many translations?; the hundred caves, openings, voices through which the Sibyl speaks, as described by Virgil; oval/ova/mouth/orifice; female orifices (Brackets-Voices-Caves - Liz Collini); the disembodied voice; wishing and longing, persevering; writing on oak leaves, which either blow away (transient) or are bound into books (learned references/resources)
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| Brackets-Voices-Caves - Liz Collini |
We thought about the equivalents of the Sibyls today; here we started to diverge in our approaches;
Lindsay, to self-portraiture and portraits of friends; the public and the private subject; the male/female gaze and the female figure; the intimate, inner world; placing symbols of wisdom within the domestic realm; the act of reading; reworking the twisting postures of the Michelangelo figures; what are these figures doing, where are they looking?
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| Self-Portrait as Erythraen Sibyl - Lindsay Simons |
Liz, towards female scientists of the modern era, often outsiders, working and writing to change what we know; those who have influenced the future; scientific writing as a form; starting with Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture; pulling apart scientific language into its constituent elements (Nobel Speech Deconstruction - LC)
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| Nobel Speech Deconstruction - Liz Collini |
And rebuilding it in new forms; finding epic language in science; finding and reworking atomic diagrams; revealing the studio’s normally hidden role as a form of laboratory or site of experimentation (Polonium - LC)
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| Polonium - Liz Collini |
BELOW:
Radium Atomic Diagram, Polonium Adjectives, Polonium Atomic Diagram - Liz Collini
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