Stigmata 2004 (My Bloody Wall 1997)

Created in about 2 days, exhibited for two and then destroyed, walls repainted in one day = total 5 days. Created in my 2nd year BA Fine Arts at Victorian College of the Arts in the Project Space. I remade it many years later at Bus ARI, Melbourne in 2004 under the new, and more fitting, title "Stigmata".

This work is intended as a vivisection of the gallery space. An anthropomorphic event, where the walls (interior) of the gallery become the skin (exterior) of some mortally wounded entity. Inside and outside are inverted. We are left standing in an alternate space of in-between: a threshold.

Some use the metaphor of a “fine line” to describe the divisions between art and design, inside and outside, good and evil. I see a space, one that, through this work, I aim to enlarge and expand.

The wound is an addition to the existing wall - the incision defines a surrogate landscape.

“…to create the one (the inside) is to create the other (the outside) is to create the distinction, in a world in which there is space – or, rather, space is made.” Ranulph Glanville, p.182 “Living in Lines” Interior Cities , RMIT University Press 1999.

Mystical Stigmata are paranormal and unfathomable: miracles or acts of evil? The sufferers: are they blessed or victimized? Mystical Stigmata exist in a place between good and evil – they are of the other. The Catholic Encyclopedia cites Mystical Stigmata as a participation in suffering for the expiation of sins. Which divides the line of questioning into two parts: Who (or What) is suffering? What are the sins?

In the case of this work the hecatomb is the gallery space. In making this distinction the environments we inhabit become inclusive of our definition of Nature. Could then “the original sin” be the exclusion of ourselves (and our creations) from that which is natural? This sense of belonging to Nature may assist us in the expiation of our sins.