‘LOST GIRLS’ : a cartography of resistance ( extract)

by Marie-Anne Mancio

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf CorpoReal depicts the naked back of the artist, the sensual curve of her shoulder narrowing to a necklace of tiny pearls – symbols of purity and Venus. She’s holding a mirror in which only part of her face is reflected: her big blue eye stares back at us. A similar mirror device in paintings of Venus by Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, and so forth was intended to simulate a three-dimensional experience of the female body, gratifying the (male) viewer’s desire to see a beautiful nude from several angles simultaneously.

Created using the same unique physi-digital mixed media technique described above, CorpoReal is an uncanny layering of shifting identities. Fontaine-Wolf’s partially reflected face appears to emerge from what could almost be a pink head-covering but is in fact a goat’s carcass. The goat has multiple associations including sin, rampant lust, carnality, and is often paired with Venus in representations. We use “old goat” to denote a lecherous man.This reference to sexuality appears confirmed by the presence of the orchids which float, suspended between body and carcass. Whilst in China the orchid is symbolic of an ideal of feminine beauty – delicate, elegant, fragrant – it also has a long association with virility. This is true of the Ancient Greek tradition; its very name derives from the Greek orchis “testicle.” (In Middle English, it was known as bollockwort.) Its roots were used as an aphrodisiac.

However, the goat in CorpoReal Self is a corpse and this a vanitas. One of a series, it was inspired by the Death and the Maiden trope familiar from Renaissance print and painting culture and beyond where a young woman is pictured with an encroaching male figure of Death. Her youth, her beauty will fade.

Yet this reading of preying man/innocent woman is destabilised by the mirror’s position. Even if we see the hand holding it, it seems to sprout from the trail of white orchid bloom, recalling depictions of Eden’s serpent to whom Michelangelo gave a woman’s form in his fresco The Fall of Adam and Eve, 1510. Another origin myth of pearls: Eve’s tears when she was banished from God’s Garden. These religious echoes are reinforced in the work’s colour palette: the pink meat for the flesh-and-blood Virgin Mary; the rich blue silk for her divine, spiritual element; the white Orchid for Faith. The goat is a sacrificial creature, of course; also the scapegoat. So who is the one suffering?

Just as the orchid is both male and female, the woman is Virgin and temptress, life and death, her many shimmering facets making her ungraspable, even to herself perhaps.