As I removed a roast from the oven the meat separated from its bone, and that bone appeared to me in all its singularity. My entry into Bone World. I am in love with bones. There is a perpetual repetition in the body via bones, as there is repetition in the unconscious, in the trauma, in recovery. The bones mediate between two worlds, the living and the dead, the material and the spiritual.

The body as location, as both subject and object, and the ways in which memory and trauma have their way with us is my endless fascination. Memories and trauma register in the body, forming an uncanny presence that awaits articulation. I return again and again to the body as self, as home. We inhabit this place that is an exquisite corpse. In this meditation on the body and its interior and the world in which we are located, I encounter the space between longing and loss, memory and its erasure, permanence and dissipation. Memory is a resurrection, a retrieval, a lullaby.

To desecrate is to make inquiry, the destructive act of creation mirrors what happens to the body. The grotesque and the uncanny must be involved, because this is a part of the (fascination with) body. The body is the ultimate historian, the story-teller, the encoder of experience, of love and hate. The body is an impermanent landscape. We cannot know the body until we contemplate its disappearance. We are assembled beings awaiting attribution. We must collage ourselves hoping to retain what is already gone.

Confounding things happen to women’s bodies during their lifetimes. We become divided subjects from the beginning; segregated from the womb to become ourselves, ushered into our seasonal existence with the flow of blood. What inscriptions, invasions, beautifications and mark-making will occur? There is surrender to the fate of the body, destiny, death. But there is also moving forward in spite of everything. The female body is a mystery, as is the psyche.