Amelia Gunn-Dalby

Disturbance as Desire explores the dichotomy between attraction and repulsion. Amelia Gunn-Dalby creates this installation to investigate her own vulnerability and shift the paradigms around femininity.

Fascinated with themes of inside and outside, the interior of the sculpture represents a womb-like space, and the exterior is the body; a structure made from bamboo to symbolise the skeleton. She uses natural materials foraging and collecting plants to dye fabric, sourcing her own clay and experimenting with bioplastics.  Biological materials derived from the human body are also included to challenge disgust towards ‘othered’, ‘marginalised’, and ‘monstrous’ bodies. Strands and swirls of hair encapsulated in gelatine to make glistening transparent sheets that are delicately handsewn onto the sculpture in intricate arrangements, creating a contrast between beauty and repulsion. Ragged fabric scraps, covered in cracked plaster and clay slip, are stretched around the sculpture in fragments. The texture resembles broken skin as does the fractured clay base. Twine and string are crocheted as chains, dyed with iron oxide, and draped irregularly around the exterior of the sculpture, reminiscent of tangled intestines. This is emphasised with gloopy gelatine and iron oxide-stained hair that drips from the chainstitched crochet, forming a web like entrapment.

Projected inside the sculpture and onto the clay base is a circular video. A long, slow, tranquil overhead shot of Gunn-Dalby’s nude body curled in the protective foetal position is interrupted and disrupted by intrusive and unsettling close-ups cut together in a fast montage to form an abstracted self-portrait. The film is synchronized to a soundscape that mirrors the sounds of the materials within the sculpture. The ripping of fabric, along with the abrupt snapping of bamboo paired with the artists heavy and mediative breathing and outbursts of moaning creates a disorientated ambiance.

Gunn-Dalby uses her own performing body and bodily matter as a catalyst to uncover conditioned social norms and to question the prurient and obsessive interest that leads to scrutiny and marginalisation of bodies that sit outside of the traditional narrative.