Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Torture Gardens

Mark Scroggin's poems are whiplashing back and forth inside my skull.  He calls them, in his new book, Torture Garden, "Naked City Pastorelles."  (Buy Mark's book here, via Small Press Distribution.)  They are perfectly shaped, formally elegant little explosions of violence, despair, wit, and observation, each contained within a strict stanza of seven four-to-six beat lines.  The idiom within each poem ranges from overheard conversation to French philosophy, from feces and spit to classical music.  This strategy, in which dark, energetic expression is confined within strict bounds, alludes to Naked City, John Zorn's experimental jazz/thrashcore band from the early 1990s,

especially their album Torture Garden. 

The "hardcore miniatures" on this album are, like Scroggins' poems (with whom they share many titles), tiny explosions of chaos, some only 30 seconds long, combining genres as disparate as jazz, classical, country, grindcore and punk.  In this the Naked City album is itself paying homage to an earlier Torture Garden, an 1899 French Decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau.  A satirical attack on the Dreyfus Affair, the book combines found text from several different sources and features a sadist/hysteric named Clara who achieves orgasm by watching scenes of torture in a beautiful garden.  Allegory, bien sûr:

"Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering."

[Auguste Rodin's illustration for Le jarden des supplices (Torture Garden).]

This is a tradition that's all about pushing the limits, shocking us out of sentimental illusion into Enlightenment forms of disappointed knowledge.  Scroggins turns the screw one more time by calling his poems "pastorelles:"  "A pastourelle is a simple poem set in a rustic scene, graceful and trifling in tone, describing the meeting of a man of culture and an ingenue, generally a shepherdess."  See the shepherdess on the cover of the Naked City album?  Yes, that's her: "The motif of the young girl scolded or beaten by her parents...on account of her lover is most frequent in the pastourelle."  To Scroggins' credit he avoids reproducing the misogyny of this tradition in his own poems, but he takes energy from its violent flouting of conventions of innocence, symbolized for him by the garden:

Luminous the division and joining

bone remains sliding screens of

landscape blanched alphabets les lumières

history revealed by pathology blesséd

art thou annunciation arrowheads catching

eyes vertical shaping water love

perdures contingencies of perception endured.

                                                        ("Numbskull")

This erudite mash-up of Enlightenment ("lumière") wisdom, Christian pietism, and garden design (vertical shaping water) testifies to the failure of any of these to console us for the losses (perdures) that can only be endured.  Art such as this that pulls away the curtain of artifice to reveal the powerless spectre behind it rides a fine paradoxical line; of course the careful "shaping" of the poem itself gives us a kind of pleasure, perhaps a painful one as its purposeful obscurity assaults our ignorance and its rapidly shifting linguistic registers knock us on one side of the head and then the other like an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote.  (Naked City was inspired by the composer of many of the Warner Brothers cartoons, and the cartoon violence is apparent in Scroggins' volume as well.)  Despite their attention to ugliness these poems can't help being beautiful.  The final stanza in this astonishingly accomplished volume could serve as its ars poetica:

"Gob of Spit"

Repeat flip rinse fist smear

shout move twist shift grimace

wince scrub dilate disarrange dismember

ravel translate offload unravel tear

stroke penetrate gesture finger retrace

retract gesticulate lick scale gut

retrace ejaculate rage respond repeat.

 

 

If This Were Not A Poem But An Actual Garden: Louise Glück

I am still vibrating with excitement after reading this book.  For her titles alone (The Wild Iris, The Garden, Mock Orange), Glück has been on my list of botanical poets to peruse.  The fact that she's won every major literary prize in the country, including the National Book Award for The Wild Iris, made my ignorance of her work even more culpable. 

Plus, very glamorous, no?

Last Monday I had literally half an hour to myself before heading off to campus for a meeting.  I opened the slim volume and began:

"The Wild Iris"

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.  I read on and began to breathe more quickly...to pant, as if I were running through the pages.  Soon I had to grab my notebook.  The place in the center of my head that yogis call the "third eye" started to pulse.  I both did and did not know what was happening to me.

The book is a meditation on loss, grief, and mourning.  Poems titled with flower names--"Lamium," Trillium," "Snowdrops,"--times of day or year--"Clear Morning," "End of Winter," "Midsummer"--or aspects of the weather--"Spring Snow," "Retreating Wind"--are, marvellously, narrated by the plant, moment, or weather itself.  The effect is breathtaking.

Hear me out:  that which you call death

I remember.

 

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing.  The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

 

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

                          ("The Wild Iris")

These plants, while conscious and speaking, are also not human.  The poet/seeker speaks in the verses titled with the names of prayers and poems:  "Matins," "Vespers," "Song," "Lullaby."  This speaker grapples with our oldest questions.  Why, if we must die, are we born to love one another and to love our own lives?  What survives death?  What can art do in the face of death?

                  But John

objects, he thinks

if this were not a poem but

an actual garden, then

the red rose would be

required to resemble

nothing else, neither

another flower nor

the shadowy heart, at

earth level pulsing

half maroon, half crimson.

                                   ("Song")

In The Wild Iris, non-human creation regards our preoccupation with mortality with some bemusement:

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.

                                ("Lamium")

                                    what

has brought you among us

who would teach you, though

you kneel and weep,

clasping your great hands,

in all your greatness knowing

nothing of the soul's nature,

which is never to die:  poor sad god,

either you never have one

or you never lose one.

                                         ("Violet")

I'm enthralled by the form, voice and vision of this book and can't wait to read it over and over again.

 

On Phillis Wheatley's Imagination

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley give a talk on the voudon loa Ezili, a force of nature that protects femininity and creativity, as an epistemology for understanding Caribbean genders and transgenders.  I have been working slowly and with great pleasure through Tinsley's book Thiefing Sugar:  Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature.

I was electrified to read the following sentence in Tinsley's Introduction:  "What happens when the beloved/landscape and the poet/lover are both women?"  Although Tinsley is writing about Caribbean literature and I'm writing about eighteenth-century gardens, these questions also describe the project of my own recent book, Sister Arts.  I think that makes our books sisters.

In this afternoon's lecture Tinsley spoke movingly about the hard work of being a black woman (as instanced by the cultural work of misisis and madivines, the Haitian genderqueers who are the focus of her new research).  She also talked about the transformative power of feeling good, and about the crucial role the imagination must play in that transformation.  My friend Omi Jones was in the audience and asked Tinsley about how she was experimenting, post-tenure, with new, poetic forms of writing (for instance in her recent essay "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic.")  And that made me think of Phillis Wheatley

whose poem "On Imagination" I read this morning as I continued to make my way through Black Nature, which I've written about here and here.  It's always seemed to me a stunning poem on many levels, not least of which is the sheer ambition of writing a sublime and existential poem that engages with a major Enlightenment aesthetic debate, all from a position of enslavement.  But not of the imagination, and that's the point.  That's the way in which the virtuousity of Wheatley's poetry is always making a rhetorical argument in favor the humanity of the speaker, but in the face of dizzyingly high stakes that would have silenced a lesser talent.  For your inspiration today, here is her poem:

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou,
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

1767-1773?

Wheatley is, as Tinsley would say, one of Ezili's children.

Black Nature

I've been longing to read and write about (and write poems with) Camille T. Dungy's anthology, Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry ever since Dungy came to Austin as the guest of the Pro Arts Collective this spring. I've finally run through my backlog of English garden photos from my summer travels, so today I was able to sit down with this luscious, thoughtful book.

the earth is a living thing

 

is a black shambling bear

ruffling its wild back and tossing

mountains into the sea

 

is a black hawk circling

the burying ground circling the bones

picked clean and discarded

 

is a fish black blind in the belly of water

is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

 

is a black and living thing

is a favorite child

of the universe

feel her rolling her hand

in its kinky hair

feel her brushing it clean

                                -Lucille Clifton

In her introduction, Dungy points out that in ecopoetics, a new-millenium movement denoting writing with a strong ecological emphasis or message, African Americans "have been generally absent from tables of contents."  Indeed, at the recent Poets and Scholars symposium at The University of Texas, Lesley Wheeler said at a roundtable that for her, ecopoetics seems to be a way to create another white canon in the wake of the opening-up of American poetry more generally to non-white voices. 

And yet, as Ravi Howard points out in one of the ten brief critical essays included here, "Waves of paradise carried slave ships.  In southern woodlands grew both emancipation oaks and hanging trees.  (Could some have been both?  Can we ever know?)  Along with the rice, tobacco, and cotton, the enslaved grew okra and yams, pieces of home for many transpanted Africans.  The connections to nature, those that haunt and those that nurture, have been with us all along."

More soon as I continue to work through this amazing book.

 

Gardening as Enslavement: John Fowles' The Tree

For Christmas in my last year of high school, my boyfriend gave me a bright yellow sweatshirt that proclaimed me "President of the John Fowles Fan Club."  The movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman (with a young Meryl Streep)

had just come out and I read the novel at the suggestion of my English teacher, Mr. Lyles.  I loved it of course, and The Magus, The Collector, Daniel Martin and all the other Fowles novels in the Calgary public libraries helped me pass the time until my longed-for escape to university.  

So I was delighted when Madge brought me a copy of Fowles' book-length essay, The Tree, as a souvenir of her recent visit to the splendid gardens at the Getty Museum while she was on tour in L.A.  First published in 1979, this book was a powerful salvo in the burgeoning environmental movement.  On the back cover, W.S. Merwin says "For years I have carried this book with me," and the new 2010 edition has an introduction by Barry Lopez.

The book is a startlingly radical philosophical defense of wildness.  It condemns all forms of human shaping of nature as a violation--not only of other natural beings, including Fowles' beloved trees, but ultimately of the wildness in ourselves.  For Fowles, our desire to subdue nature is a rejection of our own kinship with it, our own wildness, a process of abjection (though he does not use this term) in which we defensively externalize and punish our own status as part of nature. This gesture, the original othering, occurs "not only in non-human nature:  ony fools think our attitude to our fellow-men is a thing distinct from our attitude to `lesser' life on this planet."  For Fowles, the term "to garden" means "to enslave." 

At the end of the essay, Fowles tells that despite these explanations he has no theories, only experiences "as dense and ravelled" as the woods he loves.  "I know I came to writing through nature, or exile from it, far more than by innate gift," he writes, and there finds "such inturned peace, such profound harmlessness, otherness, selflessness, such unusing....all words miss, I know I cannot describe it."

Don't miss these words.

Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden

It's not just me.  Those eighteenth-century botanical illustrations really do look, in Molly Peacock's words, as if the artist had "shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eighty-five flowers' cunts."

I just finished reading poet and memoirist Peacock's new book, The Paper Garden:  An Artist (Begins Her Life's Work) At 72, a biography of Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, the subject of a long central chapter in my book Sister Arts and really, the inspiration for that whole project.  Between Peacock's book and the sumptuous 2009 exhibition catalog Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,

my obscure, beloved Delany is having a moment of unprecedented visibility.  Peacock's approach is to use Delany's life and work as an opportunity to muse on her own second marriage and work as a mature artist:  "She had no children.  I had no children.  She had a deep connection to a second husband.  I had such a bond....She had a plethora of arty girlfriends.  So do I....Her husband had died.  I was afraid mine would."  Both life narratives, Delany's and Peacock's, are absorbing reads.  Peacock's writing is often thrilling, as in this chapter that begins like a prose poem:

Now let Mrs. Delany be blooded.

Let her eyesight fade.

Let her stop painting.

Let her sit in a stupor.

Let food be tasteless in her mouth...

Let bloodlines be formed.

Let the generations fly.

Most gratifying to me, though, is Peacock's unabashedly sexual reading of the images.  Peacock gives more attention than I do to Delany's heterosexual romances (though she does note in passing the "atmosphere of gay attachment" in Delany's life and very kindly cites me on this), but we agree that Delany's work expresses a forthright and active feminine sexuality.  Here's Peacock on the shell-lined garden grotto Delany constructed with Anne Donellan, the friend with whom she travelled to Ireland in the 1730s and whom she nicknamed "Phil:"  "The grotto was like a secret garden.  It was shadowy, moist, and close:  sexy." 

Peacock on Delany's Lilium Canadense:  "She built up the surface by pasting red pieces on top of red pieces.  The lily petals have a bumpy, labial look to them.  And the colors are of excited female sexual organs." 

Umm, yeah.  In my book, I come to similar conclusions about Delany's work and use these readings to make an argument about its place in a tradition of lesbian erotic expression.  Lesbian critics are often accused of "reading too much into" images like this, distorting the past in order to find ourselves there.  It's nice to meet straight sister artist Molly Peacock in the same place.

"desire exceeds the bounds of any garden": Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations

Last weekend when I interviewed my friend Neville about his garden for this blog, he asked, "What makes a queer garden different from a straight garden?"  I rambled a bit about how it could be a matter of who uses the garden and how, or a matter of how the garden is made (I mentioned that Neville's own garden includes sisterly-sissy elements such as his grandmothers' favorite plants and some canna lilies he dug up from the yard of my old house when we moved), or the use of certain well-known erotic shapes, like the arched grotto entrance.  But ultimately, I made my away around to saying something about how a garden is always riding the line between nature and culture, between order and chaos, between art and life.  It's art in a living medium that simply obeys its own unruly, asocial sexual laws (of reproduction and growth).  So in that way, every garden is a queer garden.

What a pleasure, then, to read Ed Madden's new book and find a similar idea encapsulated so beautifully in the quotation in my title.  Ed, who was one of a beloved band of queer UT graduate students who befriended me when I first arrived in Austin in 1991, is now an English professor at the University of South Carolina.  He's the author of a critical study of modernism, Tiresian Poetics, and a previous book of poems, Signals, which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.  His new book, Prodigal: Variations, explores the very queer territory of intra-family erotics and does so through memories and experiences of plant, garden and farm.

Ed was raised by conservative Christians on a farm in Arkansas, and he beautifully evokes the fear of his father's wrath that shaped his gay childhood in the opening poem, "Sacrifice:"

When my father bound me, I submitted,

 

closed my eyes to the lifted knife in his fist.

Even now, the cords still hold my wrists,

 

rough ropes of love.  My chest is bare,

my heart lies open.  He loves his god more

 

than me.  I open my eyes, watch my father

raise his fist against a bright and bitter

 

sky, no angel there to stay his hand.

The speaker's childhood farm, like all farms, is a place of both lush growth and violent death, as in these lines from "Osage orange:"

This is eating tomatoes from the vine.  This is the cutworm,

this viscous smear of green.  This is killing worms.

This is breaking windows in the pig house.

Many of these poems were written while Ed was the poet-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina,

and here the poet, still struggling with the legacy of love and anger bequeathed him by his father, sees clearly how this laid the groundwork for a satisfying intimacy with another man as an adult.  In the garden, and with his lover, he is able to "learn the vocabulary of sweetness."  He asks,

How do I know I will miss you?

 

And why does it come to me

in a garden, of all places?

These lovely, grave, formal poems belong in the Sister Arts tradition in which garden art is poetic, philosophical, even theological, offering an occasion for us to meditate on our deepest and hardest truths, and to experience the out-of-bounds wildness of being alive.

Sister Arts the book is OUT!

I always dreamed of writing a book that looked like this.

Academic books are usually much more about content than form. In terms of design and format, they are at best serviceable, at worst plain and hard to use. But from the moment I first sent my query letter to editor Richard Morrison, asking, “Would you like to read a lush, sexy book about lesbian gardens?” University of Minnesota Press has been making my dreams come true. Richard’s own interest in gardens and poetry (did you know he has an MFA and is an accomplished garden photographer?) as well as Minnesota’s distinguished queer studies and landscape architecture lines appealed to me when I was choosing a publisher. Now, holding the finished book in my hands, everything from the texture of the paper to the eye-popping design to the typeface does justice to that first description, and to the stories I tell in the book of bold women artists expressing desire and creating relationships with one another through landscape art.

You can purchase Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes on Amazon or from The University of Minnesota Press, and it will be in bookstores in the next couple of weeks.  I hope you enjoy it.

Catherine Daly's Florilegium

In today's post I'm delighted to feature the exciting work of L.A. 
poet Catherine Daly.  In addition to being the author of several books, 
including the recent poetry collection Vauxhall, Catherine is a 
landscape designer, plant researcher, and historian of women's 
writing.  I know, could she be more perfect for me?   

 

Here are three of Catherine's poems that recently appeared in 
the online journal Fringe 
http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/poetry/three-poems-from-a-florilegium. 
I love her title, "florilegium," which can mean a collection of 
flowers or a collection of poems, the "flowers" of literature.  
The same unapologetically scholarly sensibility is at work in her 
allusions:  to strange plants like "stinking hellbore,"

 
historical women botanists like Maria Sybilla Merian, 
"the authoress of Insects of Surinam,"

 
and botanical references like "flower freaks," which 
technically means aberrant individual plants that deviate 
from the norms of the species, but which I think also
well describes the queer sensibility of Merian's 
17th-century botanical illustrations and maybe Catherine's 
haunting, crafted, surprising poems too.


 
 And I can't resist stitching into this post a 
reference to my girl Mary Delany's embroidered 
flowers, like those called to life by Catherine's line
"the preface is a history of embroidery."  

 


 Three Poems from a Florilegium

mine eyes have dazzled days
frightened in electrical storms
 of the ‘phone, of the lamp
anemone means wind: opened
by wind? spread by wind?
“flourish in the wind” or wood; beauty’s tears, love’s blood, etc. etc.

clematis with filaments twisted
 creeper
like serpents, like Medusa’s
spiral stems allow the floating female
come to seek comfort
 contumely
dearer than beauty

& a picture of cocaine or cocoa
imaginary medicine
“varied pleasurable thoughts and associations they suggest”

in wet weather, Lady’s Mantle
 ours diamond-fringed
 Philosopher’s Stone

many narcissus were lost for two centuries
 mirror
 pond


Queen of the Dead
            Lady    ly         Night-
                                    shade
night blooming, periodic
Mona Lisa on              black velvet
a Gothic beauty delights artists
named after the authoress of Insects of Surinam
whereof no mention by any old ancient writer
            nude
a new name had to be found

the hundred-tongued bird
eats the bitter berries
torch-thistle
chosen
            rare, novel
stinking hellbore
            wort
to cure worms


Flower Freaks

freak forms of the primrose and cowslip
even depicted
            in the muzzles of guns
renown in other battlefields
Hortus             exhortation      rather than merit
a hard-fought peace    a pestilent agitator
make men as mad as they please
            no, just a Quietude, a Nouvelle Vague
                        on location      jungle mists
“our places near vast forests and often inaccessible terrain”
sea-holly of inland fields—contradictory, anomalous
before flowers are perfected: dolphins
dauphins

to supply ideas to designers
of embroidery, textiles, ceramics
            “subject
                        to the green fly”

the preface is a history of embroidery
“dew drop on leaf” school
sign-manual

A Lesbian-Feminist Storybook Garden

Yesterday I got the best present in the mail.  I received the page proofs of my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, and they are gorgeous.

 

I love what the designers at the University of Minnesota Press have done with the luscious botanical and garden images, including a wonderful mash-up of Mary Delany botanical illustrations for the chapter headings—a kind of collage of collages.  In celebration of this next-to-last stage, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from the book’s conclusion.  The conclusion is called “The Persistence of Lesbian Genres:  A Circuit Garden,” and it’s a rapid tour through some of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century writers and artists working in the “sister arts” tradition of women’s landscape genres started by Mary Delany, the Duchess of Portland, Anna Seward and Sarah Pierce, the 18^th-century figures I discuss in the main chapters of the book.  Here’s part of my discussion of Toronto artist Allyson Mitchell, along with some yummy images of her iconic installation piece, The Ladies Sasquatch.  One of the things I love about this part of the book is that I get to quote my friend and colleague Ann Cvetkovich, who first introduced me to Mitchell’s work and is one of its most astute and loving critics.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to pre-order my book (and get the footnotes to the quotations below, which I deleted in this blog format), go to: www.upress.umn.edu

 

“Mitchell’s series “The Ladies Sasquatch,” which the artist has been making since 2005, consists of female sasquatch figures on a heroic scale installed in a wilderness landscape feminized and domesticated through materials: the figures are rendered in fun fur, and the hills, rocks and trees they ramble are created from “found fabrics, needlepoint, rug hookings and carpet samples, to make rocks and hills and logs.”

 

 Invoking the historical complexities of landscape politics in Canada, Mitchell acknowledges the provenance of this imagery in “Aboriginal tales about the Sasquatch, 'Wild Man of the Forest' or Big Foot (as he is referred to in the US)” which “have been appropriated by the white Canadian mainstream - arguably an expression of the racist fears around the "otherness" of native culture - and by default - nature in general.” The setting alludes both to a canonically pastoral “wild forest glen” and to “the bush,” that definitively Canadian location “outside what is formally understood as the city-state.” (Mitchell’s work also potentially puns on “the bush” as an affectionate term for women’s pubic hair.) As critic Ann Cvetkovich describes the work, Mitchell merges “Canadian wildlife myth with the tradition of feminist counterheroines,” taking “the stuffed animal of both natural history diorama and childhood toys” to a colossal scale. Averaging more than nine feet tall, the sculptures are fur-covered and feminine, with prominent vulvas and pubic hair, breasts and nipples, and underarm hair. “Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl,” reads the artist’s statement for a 2005 exhibition, “only bigger and hairier, and she may just eat you if you don’t watch out.” In a 2009 lecture, Mitchell said that she wants to engage viewers’ potential discomfort with women’s hairiness in these images of wild but somehow approachable female sexuality. The contrast in tone between the fun-fur fabric and long eyelashes of the figures, and their often menacing poses and great size, make them both alluring and repulsive, depending on the viewer’s relationship to female sexuality.

For the figure entitled “Oxana,” Mitchell draws especial attention to the figure’s buttocks and vulva--Cvetkovich calls the butt “especially important” in this work--by creating a highly-colored collage of fur reminiscent of a mandrill’s hind end. “You want nature? I'll give you nature!” One visual model Mitchell drew upon for creating Oxana’s butt is Georgia O’Keeffe. Mitchell alludes to O’Keeffe again in a mirrored red and pink rose in the hooked rug covering the base of the sculpture, just below the vulva. Mitchell says she is interested in how the figure’s haunches and vulva can be read as a flower, but also as anatomical--a key convention in the sister arts tradition.

Importantly, however, the figures are not exhibited alone. Rather, they are installed in relation to one another, “in a gathering, as though they’ve come together in some sort of clutch, or meeting, or who knows, maybe even a sacrifice.” In intentional contrast to the canonical Sasquatch myth, in which the creature is always pictured as male and alone, this is a community of powerful female figures gathering for their own mysterious purposes. The female bodies created here are specifically queer or lesbian bodies. For example, Maxie is “an homage” to Mitchell’s friend, the fat activist Max Airborne. The large back, small buttocks and short legs are meant to evoke a specific, recognizable type of woman’s body often seen among lesbians, which Mitchell calls “the refrigerator back.” In her evocation of female bodies rarely seen in canonical art history, Mitchell marries the myth of sasquatch wildness to “the mythology of lesbian culture…something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, five thousand lesbians running around naked in the woods and all of the mythology surrounding that kind of a space.” Cvetkovich notices in the work “a queer erotics…one that lends itself to new worlds that enable different kinds of feelings.” Referring explicitly to both previous practitioners in the sister arts tradition and contemporary queer and lesbian communities, Mitchell calls Ladies Sasquatch “a lesbian feminist storybook garden.””