Brittany French

Luna

Vela

From blood contaminated with black bile, mists rise, having degenerated into an acidic and corrosive vapor. These vapours disturb the movement of the animal-spirits, the executors of the mechanical operation of the brain. Within a balanced body, their nature is that of the absolute transparency of luminous rays, granting quasi-instantaneous movement. 

Blood thickens, and organs of the nervous system are compressed with stagnated blood. Through choked veins, paralysed by the tension of extreme vibration, the heart must labor to distribute the thickened blood. The task of penetrating into the very fine veins of the brain is difficult; where lightness and speed are most desirable, there sprawl the shadowed and heavy animal-spirits

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"There are jewels in my skin, so they don’t come off. Every finger has its glittery border. I run my hand against the rocks and the lights are like sparks, but they never stop shining.

There’s a pool in the center. The surface of the floor is sandy beneath my feet. I run my gem fingers against the rocks.

Maybe this hollow in the rock is shallow set, close to the surface. The top could be just centimetres beneath the ground?  The roof is so high I can’t tell. The light glints off my fingers, and the water.

The light comes from the five small glowing rocks around the pool. I know enough not to touch them. What if they went out? No more light in the gems. 

Sometimes I crouch and wash in the water, submerging my head and rubbing and rubbing my skin but the water is still so dirty. Did I come from the water? I came from the water.

Have you seen the water? I used to feel your thoughts in the sun. I know it will return, it always has but I cannot remember when I last felt the thread of our joined purpose.

Wait wait wait wait wait."

 

Tisiphone, clothed in a blood-wet dress, keeps guard of the doorway, sleeplessly, night and day.

Cytherea Cytherie Cytherea, tell us how to live.


The accumulation of relic-objects forms depopulated landscapes and temples.

Attempting to make a model of a functioning alternative world is risky. The society is hard to fake. It is easier to make convincing ashes - what is already burnt accepts our projections. A living world cannot communicate its grandeur so well as its future ruins.  

The look evokes a disembodied girl-character, Luna. These are things she made while she was trying to live.

 

For girls, achieving feminine desirability necessitates embodying the cut-off, disavowed femininity of teenage boys. In early adolescence, girls often face a crisis of depressive and self-esteem issues, catalysed by the “heightening conflict between culturally sanctioned ‘feminine’ gender pressures and personally valued but gender-inconsistent (i.e. ‘masculine’) capacities and traits."[1] Beyond adolescence, women's ‘melancholic’ forms of gender identity often crystallize, becoming stabilized and pathological.

“Modern construction and inscription of the female body, and more insidiously the ‘reality effects’ occasioned by those inscriptions, ghost contemporary feminist counter-constructions.”[2]. For the haunted, the effort does not have to be banishing the ghosts, “to find some pure, unghosted originary...but rather to summon the ghosts.”[3]

[1] Hansell, James H. "Gender anxiety, gender melancholia, gender perversion." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8.3 (1998): 337-351.

[2] Schneider, Rebecca. The explicit body in performance. Psychology Press, 1997.

[3] Ibid.

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