Forbitten Words 2000
25 bronze originals. One wall mounted.
Resembling fetishes, faecal expulsions, or unearthed fossils untouched by human hands, 'Forbitten Words' are an exploration of bringing the buried and hidden to the light.
‘The voice is emitted through the mouth, an organ that also consumes and expels food. I made these works with my mouth, ‘blindly’, sculpting wax, vaseline and rosin at different temperatures and spitting them into cold water.
Casting such works into bronze combines the revolting and the precious. The works are anti-monumental in their scale and subject matter, directly revealing the process of their making; direct traces or casts of a physical movement through time. They are, literally and metaphorically, reversals of the act of consuming, one-offs.
I see these pieces as swear-words, explosions, expulsions; the kind of noises we make when we can’t express our emotions. Swear-words usually refer to bodily functions like sex or excretion, or to a supernatural or sacred experience. Perhaps these two seemingly disparate worlds, the world of the body and spirit, are more closely connected than we would like to believe’.
Tabatha Andrews