My Bone Dust is Faint Coral
4th August - 2nd September 2023
A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
Xxijra Hii is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Alexandra Searle. Searle’s recent aim is to make objects that are familiar to her, viscerally or emotionally, attempting to imagine the inner workings of the body from her position trapped outside of it. Playing with outsides and insides, hollows and solids, materials flimsy and unyielding, Searle recreates the strange systems, reactions and inaccessible masses that silently function or deteriorate within.
This exhibition presents works in Searle’s trademark pairings, denoting a co-dependence and agency which directly connects the works to the human body; a bilateral being. “Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua, 2015. “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control”. This idea that we are in fact made-of-many, points to the necessity of dual-organs, a greater chance of survival for the genetic and psychological colonies that live within us. A second life if you will.
We don’t often look inside ourselves, yet we obsess over health, supplements and aesthetics (or rather, the optics of a healthy lifestyle). The reality is we’re made of blood and guts, sinew and fat, wrapped in a fragile and translucent skin; a protective barrier to our ‘inner’ selves. Much like the clinical drapes in the gallery; a frail depiction of hospital-like privacy and a subtle nod to the hidden can simultaneously incite fear imbued with the intense curiosity for the partial view of a seaweed-laden organ. Vague or tongue-in-cheek in their references to the body, Searle’s objects often adopt postures, or display their own mortality. A wall limply props them up, their surfaces sag, or they are incontinent. They are our failures and fragilities, however comic or serious. Often, both simultaneously. The visceral apprehension or empathy we may feel for the works as they collapse, rot or deflate is Searle’s attempt to bring life, and inevitably death, into material form.
What if organs were made of seaweed? Or Himalayan salt? How do we know they’re not? ‘I imagine my brain seeping out in shell-pink ribbons’ says Maggie Nelson 2016. This idea that we ‘know’ our body, yet cannot comprehend its makeup (or perhaps can’t stomach it) puts into question human’s constant endeavour to optimise it. How do we know if the latest ‘adaptogen’ is really doing anything? We are only reminded that we are inside our body when something is wrong; most of the time it is absent until that thin hospital curtain comes into view. We are outwardly focussed. ‘We notice the noise of the air conditioning when it is first turned on but we soon forget it’ Drew Leder. This refers to our autonomic nervous system, a human component which regulates involuntary physiological processes: your heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. All of these processes have the power to instil fear, stress and our fight or flight response. However to reduce these processes to mechanical function only is too simplistic, they are core components of ‘feeling’ human; of feeling butterflies, adrenalin, anxiety and love all at once. It is within these processes we seek a second life, another chance to be healthier, to be kinder, to be; better. They drive us to seek meaning in the world and in our lives - to look beyond the thinly veiled curtain and accept the beautiful primordial gunk within.
