CUM PATIENTIA

Cum Patientia, cotton thread on cotton and linen, 2019

                                                                © photos Alice Castiglione


The Dowry: An Autotelic Reconstitution of Texture.

 

'Tracing creation, like my maker, free -

A soul unshackled - like eternity, 

Spurning earth's vain and soul-debasing thrall.

But now I only know I am - That's all.'

(Sonnet: 'I am', Jhon Clare, 1848.)

 

I begin this analysis with an excerpt from Jhon Clare's sonnet, 'I am'; an introspective tracing of displaced self. Clare's haunting poem considers the ramifications of a curious mind imprisoned in corporeal form. Desiring freedom, Clare's meandering prose wander through images of glorious abandon, only to echo against the dull trappings of mundane lived-experience. Clare, the 'peasant-poet' searched for emancipation within his work, never finding the solace only his maker could provide. This is not the work of The Dowry. The Dowry begins with originary solace and feels its way towards corporeality, and by extensions, our own ability to create. It is Clare in reverse.

The Dowry is a piece of work fundamentally concerned with the phenomenological syncopation of everyday life: of lived-experience, of rich, robust, earthly matte. If Claire's sonnet questions the inescapable fragility of an existence separated from God, then Ludolini's The Dowry retorts with an optimistic defence of materialism. Based on the 'Elementa Chimiae', JC Barchusen, 1778, Ludolini reimagined the alchemical text by situating it in a textured context. The alchemical process is, according to De Rola, 'a microcosmic reconstruction of the process of creation – in other words a re-creation.' the original Barchusen text considers a masculine approach to alchemy which is reoriented and, one could argue, subverted trhough The Dowry's reimagined approach. Rather than harsh illustrations of the alchemical process, Ludolini's 78 embroidered images reinsert the corporeal into the ethereal. The notion of hand-stitching creates a texture format the explicitly raises questions of temporality. Textured surfaces invoke an intermediary state between the body and its surrounding world as to touch, and thus feel something, is always to be part of an extended process between the internal and the external. Texture, argues affect theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'comprises an array of perceptual data that includes repetition' and The Dowry is indeed an experiment in the rhythm of reiteration. Autotelic in its own conceptualisation of time, to view Ludolini's art is to pause and consider the totalising aspect of the feminine and its relation to the divine – all in a single stitch.

 

on The Dowry,  Katherine Anne Burn, PhD Study in the Gothic

 



LA DOTE|1+1=1 / THE DOWRY|1+1=1

embroidery on linen '' Elementa Chemiae 'JC Barchusen, 1978 / fertilization under the microscope / NASA - Voyager Recording Symphonies of the Planets I)

                                                                 © photos Mercedeh Imani


Perhaps (but I don't know) because, being a woman, and therefore starting as a "negro" compared to the whites, I still have the sense of having walked towards something that was due to me because I loved it: knowledge, science, beauty , justice. I know, knowledge, science, beauty, justice built by the "male". But the only ones that exist and that allowed me to "live" beyond the terrible everyday silence assigned to women.

 Ida Magli, 1986

 

First we compose, then we decompose, then we dissolve the decomposed the matter, purify the split matter and fix it. In this way, man and woman will be one.

Book of the philosopher's stone, 1778

 

 

'La Dote – The Dowry' is an installation that dialogues with the ancient method: an embroidery on canvas of the 78 illustrated plates for the creation of the philosopher's stone. A journey out of time between symbols, experimentation and system, a subtle fil rouge, almost an intangible sign that becomes a feminine desire for silence and method. It is a work in transition that changes according to the the space that is hosted in and it establishes a dialogue within. In the version shown in the rooms of the Omero Museum at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona, on the occasion of the Sensi dʻestate festival, the work was entirely tactile for visitors who were able to interact with it and leave a mark of their passage. For T:AIM in Palermo it has been transformed into a book, the feminine version of the '' Elementa Chemiae 'JC Barchusen, 1778. 

 

The work was presented for the first time at the Wunder Festival 2013, Cellino Attanasio, TE.


Pagina del Museo Omero dedicata alla manifestazione.

VideoPost / Wunder Festival, tra caos e meraviglia. Il reportage di Blarco.com

 

T:AIM - Transfeminism: Art, Identity, Movement