Elizabeth Rooklidge on Flavia D’Urso

weedling, soft horizon line, 2020, Kozo paper, iodine, and horse hair, 38 x 96 in.

[Image description: A long, horizontally-oriented piece of white paper with rust-colored stains running across the middle. Strands of hair protrude from the stains and bend toward the bottom of the work.]

Flavia D’Urso’s multimedia practice explores the experiences of the Queer female body and its departure from normative expectations. With her alchemical use of materials, she deftly destabilizes expectations of how the body should look, act, and desire. Her works recall ghostly, abstracted bodies, which act upon the viewer and elicit reactions that move between revulsion and seduction. They arouse a productive sense of discomfort. D’Urso draws on ideas of breakage and failure in order to center Queerness and expand our understanding of the body and self.

This is the framework D’Urso uses when she speaks about her work publicly. As I have come to know her practice over the last few years, I have begun to understand it as doing something else, as well. When, in an artist statement, D’Urso describes the bodies in her work as “tricky and sticky,” I think: yes, mine too. I live with chronic illness that often renders my body-mind unruly with fierce, unpredictable pain and fatigue. (1) Though she does not speak at length about its relationship to her work, D’Urso has, in fact, dealt with chronic illness herself. Knowing this, I have felt the freedom to consider a framework built upon my own body-mind experience.

The word “chronic” suggests an ongoing illness of long duration with no cure. Everyone, of course, experiences illness— a cold, the flu, or perhaps something more acute, though temporary— and it is often the eventual endpoint of even the healthiest lives. This year the world has been dominated by illness on a disastrous scale with the coronavirus pandemic. Many of those who recover from COVID-19 will do so with no lasting symptoms, but some will not make a full recovery and will emerge with chronic post-viral illness, possibly for the rest of their lives. They will join the ranks of those who have been sick since long before the pandemic. When illness is lasting— a persistent factor that changes one’s experience of everyday life for a long time— it forces an intensive, insistent reckoning with it. I find that D’Urso’s work helps me in this reckoning with my tricky, sticky body-mind.

Installation view, to reach for another (Touch Points), 2018, San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA

[Image description: A gallery space with a white wall and gray floor. On the wall toward the left is a narrow, vertically-oriented work on paper. On the wall to the right is a video monitor installed vertically. Four sculptures rest on the ground.]

Throughout her career, D’Urso has found a touchstone in the philosophical movement of phenomenology, particularly as seen through a Queer lens by thinkers such as Sara Ahmed.(2) For me, too, phenomenology has proven a crucial tool in understanding chronic illness. I frequently turn to the work of Havi Carel, who in recent years has pioneered the application of phenomenology to illness. She looks to figures like the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to offer a perspective lacking in the biomedical framing of illness, with its clinical focus on physiological dysfunction. Merleau-Ponty’s entire project was built upon a conviction that suggests why work such as Carel’s is necessary. “The body,” he wrote, “is our general medium for having a world.” (3) Phenomenology does not merely center the body; Merleau-Ponty says it is the medium for life. It is the body through which our worlds are fundamentally made. Carel describes the twentieth-century movement as such: “Phenomenology is a philosophical approach advocating a description of lived experience and consciousness. It focuses on what it is like to exist as humans in a world.”(4) A phenomenological approach to illness does not rely on biomedical explanation, but rather dives into what it feels like to be ill, and how illness shapes a person’s experience of self, space, time, and others. Subjectivity is prime, since chronic illness utterly transforms one’s life.

Left: her sweat, my remnants, the sea, 2019, salt, iodine, resin, plaster, horse hair, rug pad, wood, and cement, 34 x 16 x 18 in.; Right: her sweat, my remnants, the sea (detail)

[Left image description: A sculpture mounted on a dark wooden stand on a square cement base. The sculpture consists of angular, organic striations of crusted white material. Some areas are stained with a rust color. The segments touch in places and collectively are mounted upon a gray textile, the surface of which is sewn with coarse dark hair. Right image description: A close-up view of the sculpture.]

Many people, myself included, find it difficult to articulate what it is like to be chronically ill. Here, the term “collective hermeneutical impoverishment” (a string of words I love for its drama) becomes useful.(5) Hermeneutics is the philosophy of interpretation, and so, when applied to illness, this term suggests that our culture lacks the shared language needed to explain the experience. I am acutely aware of a hermeneutical gap whenever I attempt to speak about my illness and even, at times, when I try to make sense of it for myself.

For me, D’Urso’s work operates within this gap, countering this impoverishment through visual language. It does not attempt to illustrate the sick body-mind, but rather embodies what Carel calls the “qualitative texture” of illness.(6) D’Urso uses bodily materials (including salt, hair, bone meal, and blood meal, as well as paper and textiles suggesting skin) and others that recall medical procedures (such as iodine and plaster). Rather than employing these materials to create a recognizable human body, she makes alternate forms—ranging from total abstraction to common domestic objects—in order to evoke a body-mind that is simultaneously fragile and rebellious.

Pain Map, 2018, Kozo paper, iodine, and horse hair, 65 x 24 in.

[Image description: A narrow, vertically-oriented piece of white paper with rust-colored stains: one at the top, two at the middle, and two at the bottom. Sparse hair protrudes from the stains.]

The title of the Pain Maps series is D’Urso’s most explicit gesture toward her own experience with illness, yet the works themselves avoid the explanatory. For this series, she stains translucent paper with iodine. The iodine’s rusty color blots the paper at locations that would suggest the head, hands, and feet, in order to craft a gently anthropomorphic form. Horse hair sprouts from the passages of iodine, patchy and delicate, seeming to serve no purpose. The work’s overall effect is one of fragility and pain. It is a ghostly representation of what it feels like when physiology goes awry. In her sweat, my remnants, the sea, a crusty white, stained form rests atop a thick blanket, from which horse hair grows erratically. This three-dimensional object invokes bone fragments, calcified plaque, and dried blood. Upon closer inspection, the revulsion prompted by the form’s perceived wrongness gives way to an elegant, crystalline surface and lyrical passages of color. I look at these works and see dysfunction made manifest, yet they also summon an effort of self-repair. The body-mind is reasserting itself after having been broken and erased.

Pain Map (detail), 2018, Kozo paper, iodine, and horse hair

[Image description: Rust-colored stains on a white surface. Long gray and white hairs appear to grow from the stains.]

D’Urso’s work effectively suggests what Havi Carel calls “bodily doubt," a term crucial in understanding the experience of chronic illness.(7) It contrasts with the experience of health, or “bodily certainty,” in which we take for granted that we are physically able to do something— walk up stairs, carry groceries to the car, engage in conversation with friends, or even get a good night’s sleep. When healthy, we tend to do these things without conscious reflection. In chronic illness, habitual certainty is lost. Our pain, our limitations, ruthlessly shove their way to the forefront of consciousness as we cannot trust that our unreliable body-minds will see us through. For D’Urso, failure provides fertile territory.

I Will Not Carry You, 2020, terracotta, salt, and plaster

[Image description: A set of eight black stands of different heights are arranged in a gallery space. On top of the stand in the center is a terra cotta vessel with two handles. On the other stands are white forms that echo the terra cotta vessel, but are broken and have holes in them. Two broken vessels sit on the ground.]

In I Will Not Carry You, a terracotta vessel provides the prototype for nine other vessels, which are made of plaster and salt. The frail white objects are cracked, abraded, and gouged, one broken into shards. These vessels could not possibly carry anything. Their forms are starkly misaligned with their function, and their failure to fulfill this function compellingly evokes a body-mind failing to live up to expectations. Carel articulates the ultimate effect this has on our lives and our selves when she writes; “Bodily doubt reveals the extent of our vulnerability, which is normally masked. […] It reveals the true state of affairs,” she says, “which is one of vulnerability, existential uncertainty, and dependency on others.”(8) This is a difficult truth, as it runs so contrary to the capitalist ideals of independence and productivity that dominate our culture, but it is one that chronic illness gives us no choice but to face. The body-minds of D’Urso’s work bare their vulnerability openly and with undeniable eloquence.

D’Urso’s practice presents no demand for change, healing, or cure. Rather, her work embodies chronic illness as it is. And justifiably so, because the search for a cure can be wearying. Maintaining hope and, especially, performing it for others is exhausting. D’Urso’s work rejects expectations of correctness, accepting the reality of inhabiting a body-mind that is chronically ill. These complicated body-minds declare their phenomenological experience and insist upon their right to exist as they are. 

Elizabeth Rooklidge is an independent curator and Editor of HereIn.

Notes

(1) In using the term “body-mind,” I look to writer and activist Eli Clare, who says, “I followed the lead of many communities and spiritual traditions that recognize body and mind not as two entities but as one, resisting the dualism built into white Western culture. Some use the word bodymind or mindbody; others choose body/mind or body-and-mind. I settled on body-mind in order to recognize both the inextricable relationships between our bodies and our minds.” Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), Kindle edition, location 178.

(2) Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientation, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).The intersection of Queer and disability theories has been a powerful locus for reconceptualizing larger understandings of experience, identity, and oppression. See the work of Eli Clare, Alison Kafer, and Robert McRuer.

(3) As quoted in Havi Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (London: Routledge, 2018), 32.

(4) Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, 12.

(5) Ryan Hart, “Phenomenology of Illness,” Narrative Dimensions, October 23, 2018, https://narrativedimensions.org/blog/2018/10/23/phenomenology-of-illness.

(6) Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, 11.

(7) Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 94.

(8) Ibid., 96.