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KATHLEEN MULCAHY
Louise Bourgeois stated that "glass suggests the infinite
fragility of
the human person". A contemporary counterpart to these artists
is the
late Christopher Wilmarth whose work responded to Mallarme's
poetry and
the linkage between breath and soul. I see my own work incorporating
this spirituality giving form to belief.
I create forms that come out of an optimistic observation
of being a
woman. Ideas of beauty, power and sensuality inform my work as
I
explore aspects of the feminine using a recognizable object that
has a
linkage to "girls realms" - the perfume bottle or the
spinner.
In the new Persuasion Series, the works address container and
contained,
vessel and idea.
Each of the perfume bottle forms has etched into the surface
in the most
romantic script....Breathless, Seduction, Captivating, Ravishing,
Burning,
Glow, Sensational, Surrender, Quivering, Wild .... words
that are
meant to persuade the viewer to their sensual nature. In the
fashion
industry where beauty translates into commerce and surface, this
new
work is a pageant of retrieval and creation of a vessel form
that
embodies the essence of the feminine.
One of my favorite passages that has inspired my work follows:
Excerpt of text from Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto
Eco
The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to
us often about
the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation
of
the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of
divine
inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action
of the
bellows.
"God's asthma," Belbo glossed
"You try creating from nothing. It,s something you do once
in your
life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and
to do
that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous
hiss
of the ten Sefirot."
"A hiss of light?"
"God hissed, and there was light."
"Multimedia."
"But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels
that can
contain their splendor without shattering....."
beginning of chapter 34 p. 185 Ballantine
edition 1990
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