Essay: Sophia Ainslie: Inside Out, by Karen Kurczynski
Sophia Ainslie: Inside Out
By Karen Kurczynski
In a series of drawings in pen, India ink, flashe and acrylic paint, Sophia Ainslie develops a unique visual language of her own to convey highly personal but at the same time fundamentally human themes of the bonds between people, the relationship of identity to place, and the fragility and resilience of the body. The drawings define the body as both natural and cultural, material and immaterial, defined by sensory experience and visualization—in short, the body as landscape, memory, love, and loss. The flat, colored areas derive from a small series of forms Ainslie translated into painted shapes by tracing parts of a single X-ray of a human abdomen. The subject suffered from cancer and passed away after three years of treatment. The project began with the artist’s need to work through this personal loss, but in the course of its development it expanded, literally in scale and formally in abstraction and visual complexity, to encompass a particularly contemporary understanding of the body mediated by medical technologies, and more fundamentally of loss as a part of life. The drawings are also a new manifestation of what was already a major theme of Ainslie’s work: the transformation of matter into a new state, life ending and generating itself anew.
The work in this series is oriented vertically, like a portrait, implying the specificity of the subject it originated from. Yet abstraction presents these bodily fragments at the same time as more generalized sites of human presence. The abdominal forms derive from an X-ray of the artist’s mother, Fieke, as she suffered from cancer. She died in 2009 at age 82. The abdomen, then, is the charged site both of gestation and birth and disease and death. The tissues so intimately connected to the artist’s own body come to symbolize an enduring memory of the emotional, physical, psychic, and spiritual bond with her mother over many, many years. The colored forms depict not only fragments of organs and tissues, but also the spaces between them. They materialize loss in the form of both organic parts that are now disappeared, and spaces of absence given a new and profound physicality as vivid colors with their own sensory presence.
The forms are not merely organic, however; they include the shape of an artificial metal stent inserted to reopen a closed passage within the digestive tract, a medical intervention. This body, then, is not the natural body of the Romantics but a contemporary one, a hybrid of nature and technology, imagination and material presence—what Donna Haraway called the cyborg body.1 Haraway’s cyborg is a hybrid and partial creature liberated from traditional categories of identity, framed instead by circuits of information and technological representation as much as patterns of everyday life. Haraway’s theory of what she calls “partial knowledge” or “situated knowledge” considers knowledge to be rooted in a specific subjectivity. This situated viewpoint negates any pretense of universality in the perspective of a single body or a single culture, emphasizing knowledge as something that instead evolves through dialogue. It describes interpretation as an inherently subjective practice with direct social implications deriving from the fact that any sort of knowledge, from the personal to the scientific, is based in a viewpoint defined by a particular bodily perspective, variable according to genetics and culture, specific experience and memory, and significantly for Haraway, the subject’s relationship to circuits of knowledge and power.2 No body is universal: every body leaves specific traces on the landscape, lives and memories of those around it. Ainslie captures this notion in her translation of singular bodily fragments into unidentifiable shapes that only appear anonymous. They begin with the personal and move out into the public space of the interpersonal, opening themselves up to new readings, projections, experiences, and memories in each of us. As fragments, they insist on the partial nature of knowledge and memory, and refuse to project a false idea of wholeness. They are relics of a remembered life, but also reminders that as Ainslie says, “we fabricate our existence.”3 We continually construct our existence through the accumulation and rearrangement of fragments of form, memory, culture, location, and experience.
The colors also take on symbolic values, with their own specific origins and potential for continual rereading. Ainslie chooses the colors based on her memories of the places inhabited by her mother in South Africa: the landscape itself, the textiles, the objects that surrounded her in the home they once shared. They represent Ainslie’s memories together with her mother’s. In some works, entitled “Fragment-Ireland,” Ainslie incorporates her own memories of a time spent in Ireland, imbuing the large-scale bodily shapes with her translations of that vivid, lush landscape, so different from the home landscape she felt only tenuously connected to at the time. Her own impressions color her memory of her subject, indicating that her mother exists interpersonally, as much in the artist’s mind as in a separate body.
The relationship of color and land developed earlier in the “Land Marks” series of 2006–9, drawings that originated in Ainslie’s experience of the desert landscape of the American Southwest, signaled in the colors turquoise, yellow ochre, and cadmium red. That series began with the drawn lines, out of whose spatial networks the color forms appeared later. According to the artist, “The color shapes were non-specific, the mark making more dispersed. The process was organic and spontaneous. The negative space less … activated.” She made this work at a time when she felt disconnected from South Africa, when her relationship with family and homeland seemed newly superficial and filtered by fragmented communications. Needless to say, her experience of a sort of voluntary cultural exile—a psychic existence in more than one place at once—continues as she makes her way in Massachusetts, in a world becoming steadily more socially fragmented even as technologies claim to connect us. As Edward Said describes, exile is an increasingly prevalent state of existence, which combines longing with emancipation, an internal doubling that signifies the mutual expansions and losses of cosmopolitanism.4
The gestural marks of landscape developed in the “Land Marks” series reappear here, but this time they make their way out of the color shapes, in dialogue with them. The lines derive from Ainslie’s observations and experiences walking through the American landscape, and the mental image of that landscape evoked in the process of remembering it in the studio. She responds directly to the ground underneath her, specific places she explored upon her arrival in the US, when she felt disconnected from her new surroundings. She mentally juxtaposed this unfamiliar ground with the South African landscape of her past. She located herself in this new place by creating her own visual language of marks referencing its forms seen from an intimate distance. In their fluidity, the marks reference her bodily movement through the landscape, and record signs of the landscape’s transformations as it underwent continual organic processes. In “Inside Out” the marks pay particular attention to elements of decomposition within the landscape, such as rotting logs or fungi in the forest. The work thus relates bodily processes to broader natural transformations from one state into another in the endless cycle of life and death.
The works are bodyscapes, referencing multiple scales and experiences of the organic and inorganic world. The larger works reference the body at a superhuman scale, reminding us of the magnitude as well as the fragility of the landscape in relation to our own fragile, yet resilient bodies. Ainslie’s “Crawlers” series (2004–2007) was similarly monumental; it drew on the form of the earthworm, which Ainslie calls “the great recycler of the earth.” Her installations involving pinned-up and partially erased multimedia drawings of wormlike, intestinal forms immersed the viewer in spaces of transience and contingency, reminding them of the continual processes of chemical transformation that set life in a “dynamic uncertainty.”5 Echoing the environmental premise of this earlier work, the drawings in “Inside Out” evoke more subtly and abstractly the dynamic relationship between human experience and the balance of natural as well as industrial processes in the landscape. Yet they eschew the earlier focus on transience for a more contemplative dialogue between presence and absence materialized in the relationship of positive and negative space on the page.
Negative space, the third element in this visual dialogue, takes on its own life as a form shaping the color and line in turn. It, too, becomes a symbolic space of memory. It continually opens the presumed identity of the body into an exploration of space. Because the medium is drawing, the forms retain a sense of unfinish in relationship to the blankness of the page. The marks present a record of process that becomes an analogue for human experience, but an experience that is culturally mediated. The drawing combines gestural and spontaneous marks with mechanized copying in a hybrid process. The act of tracing the X-ray is a subjective transformation of objective medical imagery, a documentation that turns it into a more personal record even as it opens it up to new interpretations.
Juxtaposed with the X-ray shapes, the patterning of the lines also evokes bodies, circulatory systems and musculature. Yet the abstraction of the imagery implies no necessary connection to the feminine body other than in the artist’s own intimate knowledge of her subject, a relationship unavailable to us. This body is specific, yet fragmentary, so it becomes an open-ended sign. The body parts could be anyone’s; they are perhaps as much animal as human, anonymous in their mute flatness. The shapes are painted methodically into smooth opacity, so that they appear as if lit up on a hospital X-ray screen, backlit by the cold light of science, or floating in a microscopic field. Scale becomes mutable in the language of abstraction that evokes at once microscopic, anthropomorphic, and macroscopic worlds. The polypropylene paper takes on the plastic quality of the medical imagery itself, the impersonal intimacy of the institutional vision of the body as a “matter of concern,” flesh subjected to social and technological categorization, identification, evaluation, and incision.6 Haraway argues from a feminist viewpoint that the critical perspective of those who are subjugated makes the technologies of social control visible: “It is in the intricacies of these visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding and intervening in the patterns of objectification in the world—that is, the patterns of reality for which we must be accountable.”7 Haraway transforms the understanding of objective vision from one dependent on conceptions of the whole, transcendent body into a social process developed among particular bodies and communities. It is not necessary to label Ainslie’s project a feminist one to recognize its skepticism toward the illusions of objectivity and mastery in medical technologies (or artistic representations of the body as a totality). At the same time, medicine develops out of our fundamental desire for mastery over a world of contingency that forces us sooner or later to face our own transience within it. These drawings are less about our accountability to power, whether natural or social, than our sense of powerlessness in the face of it, even respect for its magnitude and beauty, combined with a lament for its failures.
Ainslie says of this series, “It’s a translation. About letting go. It’s more about interior/exterior; in/out; absence/presence; active/static.” The work reveals the body inside out and annexed to material landscape and immaterial memory. It insists on the subjectivity and embodiment of vision, rooting it in phenomenological experience. It gives form to Haraway’s idea of “insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (although not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation).”8 Haraway’s point is ultimately political,9 but Ainslie engages more fundamentally with memory and experience, incorporating but not foregrounding the politicization of the gendered body in an institutional setting. The work questions the basic relationship of the contemporary body to visualizations of nature and technology. It presents the transformation of a body into memory and memory into form.
-Karen Kurczynski
Karen Kurczynski teaches modern and contemporary art history at Northeastern University and Massachusetts College of Art. She is currently writing a book on Danish postwar artist Asger Jorn.
1 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
2 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99.
3 All quotes and references to the artist’s intentions come from ongoing conversations with the artist and email correspondence dated January 25, 2011.
4 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5 Franklin W. Liu, “Sophia Ainslie: Detritus,” ArtScope (March/April 2007), 23.
6 I am borrowing the phrase “matter of concern” from Bruno Latour, who uses it to mean that objects of scientific knowledge are assertions rather than facts, always defined socially by those describing them rather than by any preexisting ontology. See Latour, “Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures of Politics,” in Terry Smith, Okwie Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Antinomies of Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 309–23.
7 Haraway, “Situated Knowledge,” 589.
8 Ibid, 582.
9 She writes, “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.” Ibid, 583.
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