The Venus Project and Manifesto
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The Venus Project begins with Venus Resurrection (2024), an installation that explores emergent orchestral spiral flow as cosmos, community, and the kinetic bio- electric body. The term planet means 'to wander' and Hellenic astrological Venus signifies food, production, sex, reproduction, love, movement in music, rhythm, capitalised production, and the moving appetites. Astrological Venus first resurrects the latent harmonising potential in humanity to balance the unbridled appetite of global capitalism. Then as a ‘the body collective’ she/they reclaim prehistoric and classical Venus as Protean non-gendered and non-binary cosmological movement that flow, follow, lead, wander through, past, and beyond all borders of conflict. To date no one truly knows where we come from or to where we will return. |
I draw upon the Tibetan belief that the Bardo is our greatest teacher, Socrates’ belief that the purpose of life is to prepare for a good death, and neuroscience positions that view the body's life as possibly because of the fusion of bio-electric chemical currents and breath. My choice of using low fired porcelain, wax and pigment surface usurps the Greco-Roman aestheticising of the mythical goddess as the classical hour-glass Venus and Aphrodite. Focusing primarily on the torso I coax abstract and figurative inhalations and exhalations from the clay, varying from strongly dysmorphic shapes to monolithic totems of silence. |
Venus Resurrection I (2024)
Venus Resurrection: Unrest Wheel (2024): installation, porcelain, wax, pigment, stain (Out of Reach: The Enigma of Consciousness, Art in the Docks)
Venus Resurrection (2023-24), various groupings, porcelain, wax, pigment, walnut stain (final project is 2,024 hand-modelled Venus maquettes, various sizes)
Venus Resurrection II (2024)
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Part of the Furies Collective, ONE EXTENDED MEDITATION almost 2,000 Venus maquettes exhibited at Copeland Gallery 17th - 20th October. The floor installation included initiation and incantation performances by guest performance artists (details to follow).
Venus Rising (2024)
Venus Rising is currently showing at IBA.ART's INTO THE FLUX, Livesey Exchange, Ledbury Estate, Peckham, London until end of 12th October.
Venus Resurrection II (2024)
Installation images situating the Venus maquettes in on of Dalkeith Palace's stunning rooms. More detail to follow after the private view on 16th August 2024. This installation is just under 700 porcelain Venus figures compressed in a floor based cuboid grid. Fluxing between marble abstraction and porcelain figuration the artwork is a topography of somatic motion and breathing elevation.
Eighteen Hundred Days and One Night (2024)
1800 Days and 1 Night (2024) Installation: Porcelain, steel, copper pipes, smoke, wax, stain, plastic
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This project is both social and auto critical. This installation speaks directly to my personal refuge as recovery from bulimia nervosa in the early 1980s, mediated by the sanctuary of a year in an NHS hospital where along with behavioural therapies I taught myself how to lucid dream and meditate.1800 Days and One Night contemplates refuge, dysmorphic fear, and courage to outgrow crippling patterns of self-destruction. Inspired by the 40,000-year-old Venus Hols Fels sculptures these Venus figures emerge as voids and rupturing of porcelain clay depicted as half-formed incomplete bodies. |
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This aspect of my research also examines astrological Venus commencing with the oldest known figurative sculpture, the Hohle Fels Venus. Astrological Venus rules food, love, security, self-worth, material production, money, sex, beauty, the appetites. A complex journey, I decided to start with a deep dive into and resurrection of what I term, Protean Venus. Considering prehistoric Venus permits a pre patriarchal discourse that offers surprising outcomes! That said, this body of figures titled Venus Resurrection, responds to Kurup's view that the large pendular breasts and buttocks of Hohle Fels Venus (c.a. 40,000 B.C.E.) provided enhanced capability of ‘floating’ in marsh and mangrove waters (Kurup: 2022). Kurup concludes these figures to be effigies depicting human evolution from water to land, further claiming pre-patriarchal Palaeolithic Venus as non-gendered and explicitly non-binary being/s (Kurup: 2022). Venus Resurrection also responds to Berlant’s arguments against misogynistic patriarchal readings of Venus of Hohle Fels as a ‘pornographic’ sex object (Mellars: 2009). Berlant instead evidences the bulbous breasts and bloated belly as depicting mushroom sprouting life giving mycelium networks (Berlant: 2011). Finally, these ‘Protean Venus’ installations explore embodied orchestral spiral ‘movement’.
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