Window Gallery
Installation image
Maker: Kirsty Gardiner
Courtesy of the artist
Installation image
Maker: Kirsty Gardiner
Courtesy of the artist
Fetish and the Feline Form: A Body Pierced
25 October 2005 - 19 November 2005
From childhood we are told not to stare at the differences, but we do. We stare directly at first, and then quickly learn to glance furtively out of the corner of our eye, secretly enjoying the thrill of the unseen glance, nurturing the voyeur that lurks within us all. Behind the facade of normality, we are fascinated by fetishes, by the obscure and the obscene. Kirsty Gardiner's feline forms explore the sexual, the sensual, and view body dysmorphia almost as a new and natural evolution of the body. It is as heretical today as it was when Darwin first mentioned something about natural selection. Now more than ever we choose to pierce, to tattoo, to over consume or under consume, to lift or drop, to enlarge or reduce, to follow one path of spirituality or another. We lay ourselves and our obsessions upon alters and worship them with religious zeal, only to realize eventually that it may not be enough, it may never be enough.Ian Chapman