Containment is a self-portrait that exudes a
fragile, disordered calm. The face, my own, cast in white glass, contains and
withholds more than the pearl in its mouth. The scene is hard to decipher but
is ruled de nitively by an exploration of the borders of containment. The
borders of inside and outside, consuming and purging, are obscured by the gure
and its mysterious motive of holding the pearl.
The white glass head cast from life “documents”
an imaginary gure while she holds a white pearl in her mouth salivating, white
translucent saliva dripping down her chin upon a surface background of white
pearls framed, again, in white. The color, indeed the ery spark of life itself
and perhaps even the struggle of containment, seem drained from the gure. A
half-connected form, feminine in its delicacy, half there and half not there,
emerging or perhaps about to be swallowed itself by the creamy white pearls
behind her.
Its complete absence of color, its de nitive
whiteness and the discrete shades of whiteness therein, impart a cryptic
femininity, delicate and detailed. The use of glass and pearls, as well as
these materials’ absence of color, transports the viewer away from what could
have been a gory scene instead to a distant land of personal associations.
Containment favors suggestion and mystery over confrontation, emanating a
discursive feminine energy. The materials used in Containment irt with light
like a lover, subtly and carelessly, but do so upon a ground of grotesque
struggle. This striking shift between content and form, between gives
Containment its haunting beauty.
I nd the human ability to contain the most
fascinating because containment also indicates, paradoxically, the ability to
give. The white salivating gure surrounded by pearls suggests contact points
for existing bipolarities: giving and taking, conceiving and consuming,
accepting and rejecting. Self-possession seems an afterthought to this battle
eld of opposites, this dilemma of morals and abstraction but also of tangible
actions, emphasized in the visceral scene of saliva, pearl, and mouth.
While the narrative arc of this Containment is
unclear, whether the gure has completed her mission to contain or is about to
fail as the pearl holds tenuously to her lips, the striking restraint and
beauty in its rendering provide a counterpoint to the high stakes scene.
