Tender Bodies (In Favour of Softness)
Exhibition Essay by Heather Webb Martella
I want to lean into softness. For these words to accompany Tarryn Gill’s Soft sculptures, as an invitation for being, in your body in the world, in a way that is soft. Soft and weak like water, in the Daoist sense, where it’s considered an ideal way of being.1 Water gently erodes rock to move mountains over time. We are all soft flesh navigating a world full of sharp edges. Embracing the paradoxical power of softness to overcome the most rigid obstacles, potentially restores some equilibrium in a world that tends to weigh heavily toward hardness, particularly in a sociopolitical context. While Soft engages with perennial philosophical and psychological discussions about duality and the mind-body problem, the ego-less figures offer a more embodied approach to simply being softer.
TIME and SCENE
Velvet sparkling dusk.
A golden full Moon has already risen over the ocean.
In a pastel hued sky full of clouds,
a number of smaller celestial heads, also golden,
orbit the Moon.
Vivid lilac fog foil stage curtains
are drawn open by a matriarch on a triangle
of dazzling bronze figures in tangled postures.
Two untamed around ballet barres
on each side of the stage and one centred,
contorted into a circle,
reflecting the Moon’s form on the ground.
The Moon weeps for her, continuously.
Other than tears falling, everything is still.
(Silence)
As a perfume evolves differently on everyone’s skin, layers of scent released by warm blood pulsing under inner elbows, wrists, neck, back of the knees, reflecting an individual's chemistry. My notes reflect mine encountering TG’s Soft throughout its production. It is necessary to engage all of the senses that shape our individual experiences. So, I asked TG what the fragrance of Soft would be, and she replied with notes of water/mossy wood/soft floral.
While Limber–TG’s previous generation of figures–held tensions between light and shadow, a luminance through their union emerges in Soft. These three Tender Bodies, with their Moon and their masks, embody the magic of the alchemist’s quest for perfection; a higher state of being through the process of transformation. 16th Century philosophers wrote in the Mirror of Alchemy:
“...teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called an Elixir, the which when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, doth fully protect them”.
Beauty of imperfection. Soft is a physical projection of an individual's innerworld as she seeks to understand herself and the world she is in. A world where ‘soft’ is an insult. Transforming it from something damaging to healing, reveals glimmers of hope, with the eternal cyclic renewal of the Moon. The body gives into the gravitational pull between Moon and Earth. Moon speaks to the nonlinear nature of time, non duality, cleansing, beginning again. Rumours of rebirth run through the root system, in the third figure, a third way, the ouroboros on the ground.
The scene fragmented, spaces in between, offering moments of grace, a soft interlude to envision how we might re-world our inner and outer realities and find ways back to the body; back through silence, undoing tension, letting go of old patterns, releasing emotions. Rehearsals for a theatre piece that time forgot. The reproduction of a dream, where time collapses, twilight channelling.
On a visit to TG’s studio, my young son touches the fabric and stitch lines of the bodies, the sequins of the Moon. He does it so softly with his precious little fingers, in awe, wonder, curiosity, respect. “Sad” he simply says. “Sad”, the perfect, emotionally intelligent response to Moon’s tears, before swinging like a monkey on the barres, playful, embodied, present. It fills my heart with pride...as I pull him off the unfinished artwork. “That’s not safe to swing on, or even meant to be touched!”
TG’s creative practice is so often disrupted by a sad irony of pains, unique to being female and shaped by hypermobility. Hypermobility, also a gift. Rhythmic cycles that drive both corporeal and emotional selves and connect TG to nature. Quiet grief, yearning, the Moon’s tears collect in a dark pool of twisted golden limbs below. Soft is defying sexualisation. Defying thinness. Taking up space. Safe without orifices to be penetrated. Gazing through a soft lens. Light expanding wherever it touches, even here in shadow, working as the artist reckons with the forces of opposing elements; hard and soft, contemporary and ancient, conscious and unconscious.
She is soft; is intestine; is roots and branches, exploring all directions. It is a treat to watch TG work, erupting into graceful dance movements between long periods of focus, tenderly stitching together each still figure’s sparkling skin. Her mother took a photo of her working on one of the figures, a bent knee-like form as thick as her whole body. She is on the floor working on a body. Her limbs are the same; loose, limber, lithe, easily contorted, take effort to hold together, mirror, the works are hard on her body to build while communicating softness, reflecting on letting go of control. Soft is a window to her unconscious, cloaked with decadent foil drapes, she grapples with the tension of opposites, resting in paradox.
Suppressed emotion leads to pain and tension, when embrace and shadow-work, create space for pleasure, to find abundance. Transformation to a higher level of being once balance restored, tension undone. Untamed figures embody surrender, a letting-go. The steel armatures and gazing eyes of TG’s previous generation of bodies are gone, their insides now all squishy, subtle. Intuitive bodies employing other senses, impulses to navigate their way through this world. Mudra, hands up gesture of being open, receiving, accepting, capacity for vulnerability.
The capacity to understand ourselves better, to have compassion for ourselves and others. Revealing parts of the self, stitching the seams, making another raw, growing concept. Puppets unconsciously made in her image, controlled creations, suggesting slow animation like trying to watch a plant grow. Recalling the tremendous root force, life force of Trembesi trees of mother Earth. Here too, sticky resin flows beneath foil skin. TG hand stitches together the fabric covering the monstrous limbs. Giving her whole body, whole self, a mosaic of memory, dreams lived and inherited, experiences, cultures, traditions; transforming it all into a phantasmagoria of gold. Camp bodies as a cultural product, tapping into tremendous forces as the roots of Trembesi trees draw up from deep in the earth, and down from the depths of psyche, back from history. A gateway to magic.
Stitching is breathing, the rise and fall of a threaded needle rhythmically piercing through sky and skin cloth, each perforation, the pauses at the ends of each inhale and exhale. Lucid in this dreamscape, the evening is languid and the veil between thighs, between life and death, is thin.
The Moon continuously weeping,
a serpent below eats its tail.
And so, sparkling,
we begin again.
1. Daodejing, (Chapter 78)
