Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1
The body is absent in Anita Powell's ceramic sculpture. This absence of the body is twofold: the works present not the body itself but garment as trope of the body, and the body as not the physical, biological body, but rather as "the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body." 2 In both its aspect as garment and as a "plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body," the absent body is re-presented by its image. These works in ceramic sculpture consist in a thin (perhaps one half inch thick) and hollow shell, comprised of two molded and joined slabs. The shell re-presents the body, remolded as a social construct, subjected to conceptualization. Reduced to torso alone, without head, arms or legs, the body is re-presented as deprived of the means of perception, thought, action and mobility. The body as re-presented is thus reduced, like the sculpture that is its representation, to an object of one's gaze. The body absented in Powell's work is always a female body.
Powell's remolding of the form of the body consists in distending widenings and elongations, gestural shifts from the normative, implied vertical axis of the torso; equiprimordially expressive and critical or idealizing formal transformations. One attributes these transformations to an implied subject, correlative of an implicit but absent body. Or, one projects onto an implied subject the presumed projection of a bodily self-image by the implied subject. In a more general regard, this projection is related to what Paul Crowther terms "body-hold," consisting in:
the possibilities presented by the individual's awareness of both his or her body's relation to the world and also the scope and significance of embodied action in general. It is by reference to body-hold that terms present to perception are defined and given meaning. 3
The shell comprising the sculpture associates readily with the notion of a dress, of garment as concealing and revealing, elaborated by the integration of the form of the work with definition of the particulars of the garment through painting in glaze. Thus Euphemism is divided by the waist into an upper and a lower register. The upper register integratesthe volume of the bodice of the garment with a grisaille image of a reclining female figure, somehow at once resonant with a Japanese woodcut of a geisha and a figure from Fernand Leger's Le Grand Déjeuner. The lower register, in red, yellow, and blue, superimposes an hourglass with the ample-and anything but hourglass-figure of the torso and thighs. The hourglass motif, and the use of red, yellow and blue in its depiction, evoke the notion of time: time running out as the sand falls through the hourglass, an endgame strategy evoked by the history of their use as synecdoche for Rodchenko's assertion of the end of painting through his three panels in the primary colors. 4
A garment can be changed. It is a cultural artifact, as mutable as culture itself, a trope for the mutability of culture as a thing made, not given as an aspect of nature. There is a venerable Latin maxim, of uncertain authorship but of at least medieval vintage: Cultura fit secunda natura, 'culture becomes second nature.' If this serves, within the domain of theory, to situate Powell's work beyond the tendential ascription of essentialism to any regard of the female body, 5 so also does Powell's practice, predicated on "an attempt to detach myself from any particular feelings of inferiority associated with the typically feminine, by the process of owning them." 6
Powell's works issue from the memory of personal experiences, and of the longer and broader transpersonal memory which is culture. Powell's personal memories are available to ther viewer insofar as those memories are embodied in the artworks, through which analogous memories may be provoked in the viewer.
Anita Powell is Assistant Professor of Art at Stephen F. Austin State University. Powell received the B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and the M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Recent exhibitions include national traveling exhibitions: The Tempe Tea Party, 1998-2000, and the NCECA National, 1995-1997. One-person exhibitions include Anita Powell: Ceramic Sculpture, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, ARC Gallery, Chicago, Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Hartsville, South Carolina. Group exhibitions include exhibitions at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Baltimore Clay Works, The San Francisco Craft and Fok Art Musem. Powell's work is included in the collections of the Jane Blaffer Owen Collection, Amaco Corporation, and the Woodsmall Foundation, Indianapolis.