- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 29/Jun 08:47

At home in her body of work

FOR the most part, sculptor Susan “Susie” Dayal is a wirebender, a practitioner of a Carnival art: that is, one associated with a festival of colour, abandon, excess. But she brings to that skill her own minimalist approach, showing that sometimes, as in her current exhibition, less is more. It’s hard to think of other local artists who have used wire in a remotely similar way. Dayal mentions the American Alexander Calder, whose groundbreaking use of wire was also minimalist: he created work that was like three-dimensional pencil sketches (Dayal has produced similar portrait or costume heads made of wire). The other artist in this country most likely to mention Calder is Peter Minshall, in connection with Calder’s kinetic art and its influence on another aspect of Carnival – his own mas. Dayal is probably best known at present for her decorative anthuriums, shaped, life-sized, from various metals, but primarily aluminium, on slender wire stems. The cool curves of the metal and its tones reflect the beauty but somehow don’t draw attention to the sheer rudeness of that most sensual of flowers, with its vulva-shaped petals and phallic stamens. [caption id="attachment_1163530" align="aligncenter" width="360"] Sculptor Susan “Susie” Dayal is a practitioner of Carnival art. -[/caption] Dayal’s current show, quietly named The Costumed Self Portrait Series, is of photographs made from 1990-2000. This work, shown in Trinidad in a different form and featured in Caribbean publications in the past, caused a stir then, and, if it were shown in certain locations now, would almost certainly have the same effect again. These pictures wouldn’t raise eyebrows in the UK, where Tracey Emin, the most autobiographical of artists, has been a leading figure since she produced her Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995), or the installation My Bed (1998), after spending several weeks sleeping, eating, drinking and having sex in it. Her recent work features more blood and bodies: made after Emin’s near-fatal battle with cancer, it also includes paintings of couples having sex and photographic self-portraits of herself in hospital. In the US, Cindy Sherman spent decades taking photos of herself as numerous imagined characters in many contexts and costumes, including wigs and make-up, but did not portray herself as herself. Last year, London saw an exhibition of the nudes of Trinidadian brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder, some painted with such facility that their eroticism is overshadowed by their elegance. Still, again, one has to ask: could those paintings be shown here? Compared to some of that work, Dayal’s is relatively understated. She isn’t inhabiting other characters, as Sherman does – there’s no makeup and barely any costumes; nor are these pictures or installations that reveal episodes or aspects of her own life, as do Emin’s. Nevertheless, they are self-revelatory – physically, and in terms of the qualities in herself that she’s exploring or adopting. That they are portraits, and self-portraits in particular, also distinguish them from much local art. The images came into being after Dayal made the “costumes” – wearable wire sculptures, some including paper, thread and fabric. To document them, she photographed herself in them. But they’re not disguises, they conceal or cover very little, and looking at these photos may feel like looking through selfies never intended to be shared on social media. She was alone when she took them, and they are not performance art in the usual sense. [caption id="attachment_1163529" align="alignnone" width="681"] Susan Dayal’s The Costumed Self Portrait Series is on show until July 5 at The Frame Shop. - Photos courtesy Susan Dayal[/caption] They comprise, then, images of a near-nude woman made by that woman, and it’s that fact that confers on them much of their power. It’s informative to consider how these pictures would be regarded – and how they might be different – if they were photos of a female model taken by a male photographer. Unlike the women in most portraits, Dayal has chosen how she wishes to be seen. At the tiny Space Inna Space gallery, the photos are grouped in small series. There’s a playfulness and irony to many of them, such as the silver gelatin prints, which may be only 6.5 by 6.5 inches. With their sepia tones, dye or tint, and worn, deliberately aged appearance, these look many decades old. Dayal’s hair is cut in a bob reminiscent both of a small girl’s hairstyle and the shingled cut of the 1920s, when women were beginning to explore their freedom. One costume, which appears in several series named Doux Doux, might be what gave a Victorian gown its shape. It consists of the frame of what could be a short crinoline, and perhaps the bones of a corset; but the wire framework is the costume. There’s no fabric overlaid on it, unless you count the flowers attached to the wire. This is the skeleton of a dress, underneath which Dayal is naked. The bell-shaped flare of the metal skirt gives it the look of a long tutu, and in some of these photos, Dayal strikes ballet poses (she did ballet as a child and into her teens) or adopts ironic “girlish” expressions. With their vintage look, her youthfulness, the scanty costume, the dance poses, these pictures bring to mind the 1920s photos of the French/American singer and dancer Josephine Baker wearing only a string of beads, a skirt of artificial bananas, and a knowing smile. [caption id="attachment_1163526" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Detail from one of the Doux Doux series. - Photos courtesy Susan Dayal[/caption] In one group, the costumed Dayal is doing as she pleases, perhaps captured in a slow turn, not always even looking at the camera. These images bear handwritten comments on the expression “doux doux” and how men use it to address young women and girls. Dayal refers to the phrase as “a term of endearment” – but also calls out the misogyny of this usage: the girls spoken to in this way are “never serious,” “frivolous,” “giddy.” There’s a series of four images titled Obeah: against a dark background, they show Dayal wearing a dark full-length bodysuit under a sketchy costume that nominally covers her breasts, then hangs loose below, the lengths of wire flying out around her as she moves. The poses are more dramatic, her expression entranced, fierce. The images are striking in a very different way from the others, although in all of them, her body may become not only a hanger for the costumes, but the focus of the picture. In six large photographs named She Web, Dayal wears a costume, somewhere between a bodysuit and fitted armour, of wire twisted into a loose mesh. The breastplate is a literal interpretation of that word, with coiled, almost pointed breasts. They resemble those of Calder’s wire portraits of Josephine Baker; or the underpinnings of Madonna’s conical Jean-Paul Gaultier bras from the decade of Dayal’s photos. More than any other element of these costumes, they make it clear the wire garment is not intended to curve or confine Dayal’s body according to any standard of female beauty. They’re a casual, perhaps humorous approximation, more a shorthand symbol for breasts than a covering for them. And rather than being alluring, if this costume is armour, this element is as almost much suited to attack as to defence. [caption id="attachment_1163527" align="alignnone" width="674"] Dayal in a photo from the Obeah series. -[/caption] The skimpiness of these “costumes,” their inadequacy as a covering for nudity, instead emphasise it. And yet in this group of pictures, the qualities that stand out are not just her near-nakedness but also the directness of Dayal’s gaze at the camera and her dispassionate absorption in her own body and the job it is doing: her body is a complement to the costumes and also a way of examining and amplifying their meaning and how they make her feel. This is where the guile in this work is to be found: these carefully chosen images appear almost artless, as if Dayal simply used her body in this way for her own purposes and only afterwards decided to show the results to other people. If Dayal looks “sexy” in any of these pictures, that may be inevitable; so may be the sense that she’s breaking some taboo. People are fascinated by the naked human body. But sexual attractiveness is not the aim. Dayal, who had also begun practising taekwondo and yoga when she took these pictures, is self-aware and body-conscious, but not self-conscious. In some pictures she’s pressing against her metal carapace as if literally pushing its boundaries; in another she has two fingers in her mouth, as though pulling faces at the camera to see how that looks – to her: she doesn’t care how it looks to others. Did she weave the She Web, or is she trapped in it and trying to escape? Or she might just be dancing, knowing that when she took these pictures, no one was watching. Most importantly, whatever she’s doing, she’s at home in her own skin, her portraits of her self. Susan Dayal’s The Costumed Self Portrait Series is on show until July 5 at The Frame Shop: A Space Inna Space, corner Carlos and Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.   The post At home in her body of work appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.