Physiognomies of love
ART Angie Contini
Septet, 14 x 26 x 8cm (each), air dried clay, Natural Earth Paint
$420 for the septet
Love as mapmaker, carver, welder, sculptor, creator…line as the scribe of longing, waiting, worrying, laughing, straining, bending, forgiving…together forging a landscape of embeddings, etchings, engravings, scars, tears, wrinkles, breakages … into eye, forehead, brow, cheek, bone, skull, socket, skin … a physiognomic relic of terraces, contours, ravines…enduring beyond sight, sound, touch, smell, taste… formed and reformed in the circles and spirals of time…enduring beyond the thresholds of sense, perception, time, memory, imagining…
Artist statement
Physiognomies of Love is inspired by an eclectic, ill-defined collection of images and concepts revolving around the interconnections of love and death: the Catacombs of Paris, pre-industrial embalming rituals, the gradual loss of the senses through the ageing process, aesthetics of the skin, the myth of immortality. This septet of masks collectively marks out the imagined, cartographic proof of love’s lived experience, with each gesturing to the face as eternalising site of love’s trace.