Author Kathryn Corbett, CA - USA
At first, the rear. The stamps are dedicated to Martin Ramirez (January 30, 1895 - February 17, 1963) a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California mental hospitals, diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic.
Now, let's see the Kathryn Corbett's mailart.
The composition is beautifully balanced for style and tone, both as regards the chromaticity that for the pencil stroke. The background is a Thai temple ruin, it looks like an illustration from travel and discoveries books of the early twentieth century.
The female figure in the foreground is "full" of words, the effect is achieved through the cutout of a dictionary, cropped and hatched on the shapes in black. The figure is perfectly balanced respect to the rest of the composition, she stands out to the observer as if she has been caught in the middle of a movement, and gives dynamism to the postcard, by moving the vectors of observation from left to right.
In some ways, it reminds me something about books, reading, travel and discoveries, but with something also nostalgic, perhaps lived in the pages and in the imaginary speculation.
All the tension of the mailart is played between the being "wordy" girl and the ruins. And it's the combination of these two elements, which stimulates both the rational that the irrational part of the observer, putting those two aspects in conflict.
The "wordiness" of the girl is revealed on her skin, where there should be her flesh there are the words. She does not speak, but she is full of words: this short circuit slides the meaning of the term in a - wordy - figuratively rather than real, and makes us wonder whether it is a metaphor for the fact that the girl is verbose when speaking, or if being wordy is a quality that has been sewn on the outside, on her, like a garment that covers her entirely, as a kind of barrier, a veil that prevents us from seeing the reality of her figure.
Many poets of the past have approached the term "ruins" to the word "mute". And the ruins are truly mute, have no voice, but they only speak with their appearance, with their image; the girl, however, has many words on herself, but she does not have an image. What is old, still and dead speaks through its image, its representation; the girl who wanders through the ruins of this reality - the reality of this mailart - is in movement and redefinition continuously through words.
It's a beautiful mailart, and I jealously cherish it for long.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento