Laurie Charles / Moon in Scorpio
Brussels-based artist Laurie Charles (*1987, Belgium). Working in film,
writing, painting and installation, Charles creates speculative narratives by
interweaving stories and histories, drawing on fiction, folklore, humanities
and science. For “Moon in Scorpio”, a textile environment of hand-painted
pillows and curtains, Charles concerned herself with the historical linkage of
health and gender.
sculptures, large enough to sit on, their cottony texture inviting touch. These
hand-sewn, hand-painted pillows reference anatomical drawings of plants, their
microscopic insides magnified, but they also call to mind the shape and
structure of the female sex organs. Inhabiting a space in between domestic
coziness and sculptural quality, inside and outside as well as human and
nonhuman, the pillows are not least reminding us of the undeniable kinship
between people and plants.
of medicine. Sprawled on the fabric rather than arranged in chronological or
serial order, the various images and symbols in popping colors draw on and
interconnect personal, mythological and historical stories of female health and
healing: The moon represents the lunar cycle, which is closely linked to the
menstrual cycle; the snake is an ancient symbol for fertility, the bowl with a
snake coiled around on the other hand is the internationally recognized pharmacy
sign; the image of big purple hands with red-painted nails surrounding a joint
is reminiscent of the healing power of the laying on of hands; ginger, spoons,
scales, and herbs can be read as general plant-based medical imagery, but they
are also direct references to the artist’s extensive theoretical and literary
research on witchcraft, wellness, (female) health and illness.
What ultimately lies on the core of “Moon in
Scorpio” are reflections on the notions of “health“ and “sickness“ that are in
turn fundamentally and inextricably linked to gender as well as to
understandings of what makes a happy and worthy person. Our contemporary
society values productivity, a healthy body is hence a body which works, a body
which is capable, a body which functions in all senses of the word. Anybody and
any body that deviates from this normative status of health is by definition
sick and in urgent need to be fixed. In her “Sick Woman Theory“, Johanna Hedva
makes a point in turning this logic around by formulating a powerful plea: “You
don’t need to be fixed my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing.“ Being
sick, then, can be rethought not as the direct opposite of being healthy, but
rather as another state of being, namely one in which our body and our organs act
up and “revolt“ against their own silence, as anatomist and physiologist Marie
François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) put it centuries ago. It is once our body is
not “working“ properly anymore that we become aware of it, that we can get back
in touch with it, tend to it, and, somehow paradoxically, might feel more human
than we did before. It is then that we can ask: What is it that makes us sick?