Saturday 3 June 1995

Mary Catherine Newcomb: Corpus Delicti


“The stuff that is outside... is also inside.”

The body as a medium and subject of visual expression is as old as the history of art. The ancient Greeks and Romans idealized the body in their visual arts. The artists of the Italian Renaissance aspired to the same classical ideal. Medieval artists, however, lost the interest and perhaps also the ability to represent the body. Nineteenth century landscape painters and 20th century abstractionists denied the body entirely and championed a disembodied spirit and intellect. The body dominates the visual arts -- then it fades from view, only to appear again. Enchanted by progress, we are confident in our ability to transcend physical limitations and we scorn our fragile bodies. Sobered by experience, we meditate on our transient flesh. Are we primarily physical or mental beings? Are human beings, god-like creatures who appear on earth with physical bodies, or mere animals, differentiated from other life forms only by the certain knowledge of our own mortality?

Mary Catherine Newcomb is an artist who tells stories that reflect her interest in esoteric knowledge. The media, subjects and symbols in her work are determined by the stories she wants to tell. The scope of her art production is wide and has included found objects, conceptual and interactive constructions, painting and sculpture in papier mâché, concrete, wax and plasticine. Beginning with her papier mâché works and body castings of the mid-1980s, to the recent plasticine works, Mary Catherine Newcomb has consistently returned to the body as the dramatic site of interaction between thought and feeling. In wax, plaster, concrete and plasticine she has used the body as a symbol of consciousness and as a vehicle to express universal desires and fears. The body in her work is not a classical image of perfectibility to be feared and adored, rather, the body is located at the intellect's base, as the core and character beneath all knowledge. The body is a partner in a dialogue with the mind, providing a wealth of sensory information to the brain and providing abstract thought with an emotional and physical context.

Mary Catherine Newcomb's figurative work has developed and matured over the past ten years and can be roughly classified into three bodies of work. Narrative dominates the earliest work. Figures interact -- they illustrate a dramatic metaphor, or act out a personal passion play. In the late 80's she added gesture to her rhetorical repertory through the pose and repose of body parts cast in plaster, wax and concrete. This work isolates feeling as significant and meaningful in its own right. More recently Newcomb has been exploring the expressive qualities of unmediated, tactile sensation in a series of large-scale plasticine works. These three approaches rise, subside and interleave through the decade.

An early narrative work, such as Untitled ("Boat"), 1987, is almost entirely symbolic in character.1Stylistically, it is stiff and lacking in formal expressiveness. The use of papier mâché as a medium around this time, however, provided the artist with a sensual counterpoint to the creation of representative narratives. Working with papier mâché was a low-tech process that afforded the opportunity for a material bridge to an elementary, repetitive form of material play, a quality she would seek to re-experience in the later plasticine pieces.

When the artist moved into the more industrial processes of body casting, engineering took over from exploration. Dramatic moments in the stories of godlike, mythological characters are represented in this series of work in an "archaeologically distressed" form. If the papier mâché works retained a stiff, archaic quality, the body castings have a flowing, dynamic Hellenistic character. In an apparent counterpoint to the new materials, the intensity of the artist's rhetoric heats up into more dramatic "events". We feel we have entered a pivotal moment in the course of a drama when looking at these works. The intensity of these images is heightened by bizarre juxtapositions with animals and the highly naturalistic postures and gestures of the human characters.2The figures in these pieces are, for the most part, castings taken from the artist's body. Newcomb is both the artist and the model -- both the director and the actor physically interpreting the script. Works such as Untitled ("Motley Pie"), 1989, and Untitled ("Twin Goddesses II"), 1990, in the exhibition are exemplary of this body of work.3

"Twin Goddesses II" is an image of two female figures, one with a head, one headless. The figure with a head is wearing swimming goggles around her neck and holds a towel to her chest. She appears to be emerging from a pool, perhaps a baptism. Her mouth is open as if to take communion. The headless figure holds a snake towards her. The piece recalls the ancient sculpture Laocoon and its depiction of the scene from Virgil's Aeneid where Laocoon and his sons are strangled by a sea serpent. Whereas the death of Laocoon and his sons was a sign of tragedy in foretelling the immanent fall of Troy, the "Twin Goddesses II" is an image from a personal creation myth. The artist has created an image of the dialogue between the mind and the body -- where the body presents the mind with an incontrovertible awareness. For the artist, it is a statement about truth itself -- the physical, emotional experience of how one perceives something to be true. Truth, the artist insists, is only partly intellectual. It is also something felt.

When the complex narratives, metaphors and parables of feeling became less interesting to the artist, what remained was gesture -- the physical expression of feeling. Untitled ("Worm Man"), 1991, is the last of the concrete body casts.4Unlike the interplay of figures of the earlier narrative work, this piece and the body casts that follow it are more likely to embody an undefined physical or emotional feeling rather than illustrate an event within a larger narrative. It is a transitional work marking the end of the dramatic mythological narratives and the beginning of works that are almost purely emotional feeling given form. The "Worm Man" is an image of a man with half a head emerging from a coiled shell. It can also be seen as a possible ironic reference to the image of Venus being born from a scallop shell.5Interpreted from a purely physical point of view the piece suggests confinement and embodies the emotional struggle to be free.

The artist's figurative work began around this time to resolve into simpler statements -- a gesture, a reference, a feeling rooted in the body. Untitled ("Foot"), 1990 is a forward-looking piece that takes an unconscious expression, such as how you position your foot, and turns it into a quiet reflection on security and vulnerability; the exposed underside of the foot being a very vulnerable place. In contrast to the heavy languor of the "Foot", Untitled, ("The Ascent of the Virgin I & II"), 1994, express an anxious feeling of detachment and up rootedness. The alternately relaxed and tensed postures of the legs may suggest peace and anxiety, acceptance and denial. Recalling the earlier work, the "Boat", and its cyclical voyages between the living and the dead, the "Ascensions" replay the drama of every artist's split personality; namely, the intense introspective personality and its alter ego, the extrovert. Untitled ("Whisper-ma-phone"), 1995, continues the theme of the artist's ambivalent participation in the world. The crouching position of the figure with its face on the floor and the hands covering the ears is an unambiguous rejection of everything exterior. Yet the playful, wildly curling horn connected to the figure's hip appears to confound the figure's rejection. The world, in its wild and willful unpredictability, comes in the side door.6

If the narratives eventually resolved into the gestural statements of bodies and their parts, perhaps the next logical step on the part of the artist was to strip the figures of their dramatic gesture. This move is already hinted at in the matter of fact, oversized rendering of the "Foot", which bears little of the dramatic expression of other pieces made around that time. The scale of the "Foot" is the dramatic rhetorical device that replaces gesture. The plasticine body parts Untitled ("Tongue"), 1995 and Untitled ("Ear"), 1995, retain the same dramatic proportions. These sense organs stand as symbols of stimuli processing, heightened awareness and sensitivity. The gooey, home-made plasticine from which they are made is like a raw flesh which has had its epidermis removed. It is an irresistible primal muck that recalls an infantile, uncensored exploration of the world through the senses.

The profound experience of creating images with her own hands is fundamental to Mary Catherine Newcomb's understanding of her own art. From the early papier mâché works, through the body castings and the large plasticine pieces, the artist has literally immersed herself in her materials. The images she creates represent at once her connection to the larger world and her distance from it. The artist's hands, in the work Untitled ("Blue Hands"), 1995, may be gestural devices, but they are surely symbolic on a deeply personal level as well. The blue wax hands, chewed off at the wrists, are a symbol of a singular struggle. An inversion of the myth of Pygmalion, the artist has not fallen in love with her work, but rather sees in it the devices of her own entrapment. To make art, to be an artist, is a calling and a fate. Mary Catherine Newcomb affirms that the practice of making sculpture is not an endless love song in clay. It is a rage against limitations on the spirit.

Notes
1.    In Untitled ("Boat") a female figure dressed as a warrior lies on a flat-topped boat. At the prow of the boat is a laughing hyena. The "Boat" makes reference to the Hades of Virgil and the barge that carries the dead across the river Styx. The hyena, according to the artist, makes a mockery of the fate of the warrior (the artist?) and anticipates many return trips between the world of the living and the dead.

2.    The artist's use of animals in her work is consistent throughout her career. These animals may be likened to the animals of aboriginal creation myths. Rabbits, as carriers and symbols of occult knowledge, frequently occur in her papier mâché and concrete casting work of the 1980's. Mice, snakes, a hyena, a fish, a sheep, and an alligator make appearances in the narrative work as symbols of esoteric knowledge.

3.    Untitled ("Motley Pie"), concrete, 1989, is a dramatic image of the head of a sheep licking the hip of a woman. The sheep's head is suspended in air, its sole support is a steel bar that connects the tongue to the torso. A propane torch, anchored in the hollow of the cast body, sends a lick of blue flame from the place where the tongue and the hip meet. The sheep was part owned by the artist and kept on the co-owner's farm. The genesis of the piece came with the slaughtering of Motley. For Newcomb, the piece recalls our guilty relationship to the animals we eat as well as making reference to biblical animal sacrifice. The image according to the artist, comes from a dream, generated by the confused emotions related to the animal's slaughter and butchering. In the dream the artist perceived the animal licking her hip and characterized the feeling as a cleansing -- "a cleansing burn."

4.    The "Worm Man" directly precedes the artist's first plasticine piece, the large Untitled ("Shell"), 1992. The shell functions here as a creation symbol. The dramatic narrative (e.g. the depiction of a birth) is displaced by the dramatic scale of the shell and the muddy tactility of the plasticine. Yet, as conceptually monolithic as this piece is, fresh rabbit tracks in the plasticine indicate the artist's reluctance to entirely dispose of the narrative thread.

5.    The ancient myth of Venus has it that she was born from sea foam, but the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli depicted her emerging from a scallop shell in his famous painting, The Birth of Venus.

6.    Then he grunts, "I will call you by Whisper-ma-phone for the secrets I tell are for your ears alone." The Whisper-ma-phone is inspired by the children's book author Dr. Seuss. See Theodore Geisel, The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, Random House, New York: 1971.