Fiona Kinsella

There is a clip from a "documentary" of Sir Henry Wellcome's collection of body and medical curiosities[1] wherein a sequence of several lingering close-ups of a porcelain miniature of Japanese erotica is extended by a concluding shot of a mechanical hand's rapidly curling fingers, as if in stoically-beckoning reaction. Fiona Kinsella's exhibition 'The Wilderness' similarly demands both the extension commentary of multiples and multiple looking, as well as the close-up intimacy of miniatures and their gentle indifference to everything outside of their inner worlds. Because we can't quite see what is right in front of our eyes, the pieces have an eerie authority and independence beyond our scrutiny. In this way, the works are incredibly quiet despite the seemingly ravenous life inside of them.

The art of confection sculpture might be exotic to many viewers, possibly associating something in between the wedding cake and the Japanese box. As Kinsella has these hand-iced cakes perform amidst objects of her personal and extensive collection, I would make another link, which seems strongest considering the homogenous, serial nature of these pieces and their ornately-framed display behind glass - the relic and Victorian memento mori.

Kinsella lists the objects within each piece in a combination of objective and subjective inventory, as these lists can include "fondant icing, lock of hair, silver and rhinestones" alongside "melancholy" and "teething". Despite the literal integration of cake with objects such as insect carapace, teeth, and loops of hair with ivory icing, cake and found object remain very separate, and therefore each embedded performance seems deliberately visceral, provoking physical empathy, and placing the viewer in the titillating role of meta-reacting; that is our understanding, by extension, of having and loosing teeth, even an eye for a glass version, and wanting to preserve this strange evidence of ourselves, our physical facts, shed and made foreign and indifferent to us, even of independent desires and motives. As Pierre Fadida suggests in his essay "The relic and the work of mourning", this physiological detritus might be said to have been "extracted from a disappeared body... legitimiz[ing] a visibility of the hidden"[2].

Of Kinsella's work, I would extend this to a removal of the body into a context wherein otherwise improbable (or impractical) fantasies of bodily extension can take place. Within one piece, a dark hillock of hair sprouts long Dental instruments, which arch and pierce the air like mechanical limbs. Navel-like holes encase bones, ringed with crystalline pearls, or restrained by an encircling claw of insect legs or birds' nails. Transparent, sepia-lined insect wings bejewel and encircle a navel-like antique brooch upon a swelling of cake. Glazed human teeth in vivid stained color accentuate the head of a fork with teeth-on-metal associations. Other teeth are oversized in groups, and upon one cake, their line-up humorously resembles a tableaux not far from Victorian taxidermy. Brightly colored hat pins, while delicately fan-shaped in some instances, also singly pin and dissect.

There are pieces which make the link from cake to bed, whether funereal, wax anatomical, or romantic story of near-death and languishing. Which leads me back to the aforementioned Sir Henry Wellcome curio sequencing; these cakes, like the white gloved handlers of ages-old artifacts, gingerly lay bare, encase, or provide the inner-vitrine pedestals of these objects without contamination or stain save for the occasional lingering bruise of metal upon icing.

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[1] The Phantom Museum. Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers. DVD. Prod. Keith Griffiths; dist. Zeitgeist Films, 2003.
[2] Fedida, Pierre. The relic and the work of mourning, Journal of Visual Culture, v. 2 no. 1 (April 2003) p. 64.