Shrine to Navel Gazing invites you to reconsider your relationship towards your belly as a portal to introspection, interconnection, and gut instinct.
Looking through the bellybutton, I centre the stomach as the site of the most intimate conflicts and desires, whether chemical, cultural, political, or emotional.
My practice investigates the porous, holey nature of bodies through lively multi-media installations. My playful approach uses visceral and unconventional materials to perform symbolic transmutations that blur the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’. I am interested in food as a material and subject in how it reveals both moralistic implications and carnal desires.
Language is a key material in my work; using philosophical and fictional influence I examine eating and digestion, an area frequently dismissed by post-enlightenment philosophy which often separates mind and body. I explore our relationships to food and bodies through discomfort, beauty, and the transgressive power of humour to invite engagement with that which may be otherwise off-putting.
The phrase ‘navel-gazing’ derives from the ancient Greek tradition of omphaloskepsis, the act of gazing at one’s belly button in contemplation. Shrine to Navel Gazing defies the negative connotations of ‘navel gazing’ in Western usage of self-indulgence, instead meditating on the bellybutton as a symbol of trans-corporeal intimacy: a site where bodies, food and environment digest and metabolise one another. I connect this to the word ‘conviviality’, which suggests in its etymology the relation of eating together to living well together (from Latin convīvium (“a feast”) + con- (“together”) + vīvō (“to live).
The bellybutton signifies both the borders and the permeability of the body, recalling life before birth, connection to the inside of the mother’s body. Bellybuttons suggest nourishment, being a kind of mouth formerly connected to the placenta. Indeed, the outer belly is often referred to as the stomach, equated with the digestive organ inside.
The starting point of this work was a series of anxious dreams in response to the digestive illness of somebody that I love. My mind conjured images of the inside of my body in detail: my guts, bones and flesh becoming soft pink jelly. These images have inspired the forms of a series of ceramic vessels which toy with domestic pottery forms and openings to suggest insides and outsides of bodies. The ‘jelly bellies’ depict the stomachs of my nearest and dearest, relishing in the fleshy materiality of jelly which connotates both fear (“I turned to jelly”), and celebration. ‘Navel Gazers Vanitas’, a triptych of printed figures engaging in omphaloskepsis, invites you to reflect on your own navel in their mirrored bellies.
