(2021) As an exercise during my mentorship, Apurva Kulkarni invites me to create a doll. I use a simple paper template and proceed intuitively using felt as my material. While hand-stitching the doll, images come to my mind-eye – the doll wearing red boots, the doll swimming in the sea. As the doll starts taking shape, being able to hold it in my hands is moving.
The doll has two sides – the red side represents the flared-up, angry skin; the purple side represents healing. My skin has the capacity to be both and either or. The Skin Goddess’ power is both and either or. After I finish the doll, it is obvious that I have created a powerful object. I struggle to find a place to keep it because it feels sacred. I am happiest when I hold it or my daughter holds it but never know where to keep it. This prompts a research into shrines. I feel that I should make a shrine for the doll.
Felt is a commonly used material in craft and I used a commercially available kind for this project. I try and find out about artists who have used felt in the their work. One notable example of an artist who has created art in felt is Joseph Beuys (1921-1986).
[Beuys] described the suit as an extension of the sculptures he made with felt, where the material’s insulating properties were integral to the meaning of the work. Beuys intended this concept of warmth to extend beyond the material to encompass what he described as ‘spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution’.
https://www.tate.org.uk
(2022) I take part in the online residency As Above So below curated by Apurva Kulkarni where I am once more prompted to create a doll, this time to manifest my own shadow. I choose to manifest fear and rage as associated with my experience as a woman wearing the glasses of feminism in a patriarchal system. The paralysing fear and the anger that transforms into frustrations. The contained emotions. Reading about feminist self-defence, I gradually became aware that fear can be an ally and that anger can be channelled and expressed in vital ways.
Through the reading and the doll-making, what manifested through the doll is not debilitating fear and frustrated anger but fear and anger as power. The doll became a manifestation of a force that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. I name her Flayje, of female fear and rage.
A subsequent prompts invites us to burn the doll. Being reluctant to burn the positive symbol I have manifested, I instead decide to manifest the shadow of the doll, symbolising what weakens me and holds me back, and to burn the shadow instead of the doll.
THE SKIN PROJECT 