La beauté révélée

A work commissioned for the Chåteau de Kerjean, Finisterre, France, as part of their programme for 2018, in collaboration with Le Passerelle, Brest: Bel, belle, belles. La beauté à la Renaissance Responding to the idea of a une nouvelle figure féminine, each work is a voluminous skirt, after the style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is free-standing, emptied of a body that supports it, while nonetheless suggesting its presence. Each skirt is made of a beautiful silk velvet, in a rich colour, sumptuous. The form is based on the underskirts of the Renaissance and the Baroque, noted for their diversity of colour. The skirt is supported by an invisible structure, a three-hooped crinoline or vertugadin (described by Madame de Motteville as a ‘round and monstrous machine’, splints of wood were used to compress the waist, and circles of wood – or iron or whalebone ––– were sewn inside the skirt to give ‘l’espoitrinement des dames’ ; above all, writes Montaigne, ‘it was necessary to astonish the world by a slender waist’). From the waist of the skirt, a long ribbon, in a contrasting colour, appears to fly up high into the air, carried in the beak of a small stuffed bird. The other end of the ribbon trails to the floor, where it becomes the bookmark of a book carried in the jaws of a stuffed fox, emerging from under the skirt. The books are leather-bound, closed, gold-embossed with the work's tile and the colour echoes and contrasts with the colour of the velvet skirt. The books, like the birds and the foxes, are animal or were once animal, in the sense of being skins or being covered by a skin, both natural and unnatural. Like the figures, they are empty, though the insertion of the bookmark ribbon might imply there has been some act of reading (or writing – as no title is evident, these might be a journal intime, both private and public).