Scalzotto Sara
Angry Bleeding Girl with Full Solar Eclipse
Ceramic, nautical rope
2020
Angry Bleeding Girl with Full Solar Eclipse is a chest plate, moulded in the shape of a spider-comb-girl with a giant vagina-head, whose gawking mouth is eating the sun. Its simple shape in clay, left raw and unglazed, it’s a mystified self-portrait at the time of my menarche, which happened during a full sun eclipse. Through a grotesque and mythical reading of the events, the chest plate rejects narratives about women’s bodies as biologically controlled but rather explores the experience of vulnerability as an embodied transformative force.
Those ceramic armour refuse a utilitarian use but function more like talismans, harnessing the clay’s own capacity for physical and chemical transformation. Within the process of working in clay, control is surrendered to the material, in a manner similar to a spiritual practice or ritual. Thus the value of making becomes primal to the forms the outcome might have.
