“Feed the Demon: From the Femina Ornamentalis Series” by Salma Caller
What does my art mean to me? My art and writing define me. They are my way of living and being alive. They are how I understand myself and the world I move in. My art and writing, inseparable from each other, arise from a fault line running through my identity. Egyptian father and English mother. Intense confrontation holds hands with curious meeting. Across the fault line weaving back and forth are threads and vines. My art and writing are the threads and vines that bring together the unexpected, and hold contradictions within one body.
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Salma Caller Artist Statement:
I am an artist, art historian and writer, born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother. I grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, and now live in the U.K. The focus of my work is cross-cultural exchange, and particularly expressing my mixed-race identity, cross-cultural experiences, and exploring how the personal and political are intertwined deeply in our embodied ways of being. My art practice embraces collage, drawing, watercolour, photography, projection, installation and film. I also write art theory, poetry and creative non-fiction. I have a background in medicine, pharmacology, and teaching cross-cultural understanding of aesthetic frameworks.
This work is part of a text work and a series of works on paper, together called Femina ornamentalis. A work about a pseudo-scientific imaginary found specimen, gendered female. Collected in some ‘exotic’ land. Studied as a specimen by some ‘institution’ and held in an ‘archive’. A hybrid ornamental creature whose form is disruptive and causes confusions of categories. I created these works with the purpose of exploring how ‘she’ is constructed, and to unpick any ornamentalised, feminised, colonial, racist, and or orientalist tropes in texts and in images. Maybe by gathering all those elements into one being.
I began creating these collage works on paper, and writing notes as I worked. The notes became the text work to accompany the series of four collages. I wanted to explore and unravel how our understanding of our bodies is formed and how that can be un-made. Or how we ourselves contradict those notions in our very fluid and fractured being.
I incorporate into my work, both visual and written, multiple interconnected strands, multicultural elements. Fragments from nature and culture, and from ‘East’ and ‘West’.
My writing and art draw on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary modes.
Entwined and embodied within these notes and collages, is my own, very personal, relationship to hybrid ornamental forms. I ponder my body and self, formulated as a female hybrid ornamental being. I am constantly examining my identity as both a private and a political entity, created across constructed notions of East and West that I grew up within. I am always searching for more embodied and embracing ways to understand our bodies and our relationship to the world. My work aims to unpick and destabilise any patriarchal, racist and misogynistic frameworks, in particular those embedded within mainstream canons, that have traditionally despised the body, the biological living body, especially the female body, and that have led to the construction of marginalised, exoticised, orientalised ‘others’.
