Victoria Royds – Search for Unity

Studio Altenburg opening speech – Laura Murray-Cree

On the cave walls of antiquity from Europe to Australia we find the marks of open hands asserting the ‘I AM’ of existence, the creative impulse of the human spirit. We have seen these hand-marks recently in Braidwood during the Two Fires festival – twinned and multiplied throughout the town in themed celebration of ‘Walking Together’ in our personal and community lives.  

Victoria Royds, in this exhibition, creates her own cave-like space with an installation of arms and hands that hang limply from a ceiling, which, far from asserting ‘I AM’, prompt questions of identity – the ‘Who Am I?’ of existence. This work, together with her series of small bronze female figures, evokes those hidden pathways of the human psyche which, if we choose to follow them, lead to moments of awareness and healing – a continuing process as we move through the moods and cycles of life.

Victoria Royds’ work is concerned with balancing opposites – yin and yang, mind and body, male and female. Her process is essentially Jungian, and her inner journeys and instinctive creative impulses have been rewarded at various points by chance discoveries that have shed light on her preoccupation’s as an artist – for instance, prehistoric Venus figures and the timeless myth of the Handless Maiden.

It is fascinating to me that Victoria began her art career as a jeweler, creating vessels and body adornments, especially arm bands, whose outer surfaces were often raw and unfinished looking while the inner surfaces were lined with silver – hidden to those without the inclination to explore. She was making these works long before encountering the Handless Maiden story, which I’ll recount briefly here:

Once upon a time a miller, down on his luck, makes a pact with the devil, promising to give him whatever is behind the mill in exchange for material security. Little does he know that his daughter is behind the mill and has been promised in that moment. The daughter’s innocence succeeds in warding off the devil but he exacts revenge by ordering the miller to chop off her hands and send her out into the world. Being very beautiful, she eventually meets and marries the king who makes her hands of silver. She bears him a child but has to flee with her baby into the woods to escape the devil during the king’s absence. One day, world weary and exhausted, she comes to a stream and bends down to drink. The baby slips from her back and, as she plunges her hands into the water to retrieve what is most precious in her life, her hands are healed.

 

Victoria made the components of ‘Girls’ Skins’ by painting layer after layer of latex onto the plaster moulds of the arms and hands of 60 women of various ages. They are all left-handed because this orientation relates to the creative, right-hand side of the brain. The process of body casting in plaster was ritualistic, the women holding their arms in the air, experiencing fatigue, feeling the liberation and rebirth of the arm when the casts were taken off. Victoria told me of one exception, a woman whose lymph glands had been removed after breast cancer and who had to proffer her right arm instead – a poignant exception but one that Victoria says adds another layer of meaning to the work. If you were able to look inside the latex skins you would see the subtle impressions of the women’s arms – lines, veins, hairs, pores, scars – traces of their living bodies. Again, the precious marking are to be found within the hollow forms.

In contrast to the latex arms, the bronze figures are held in extreme poses – from bound, frightened and grief-stricken forms to the goddess figure with three sets of arms, the anima/animus figures and the primitive, freedom-fighting crocodile woman. While representational, the figures are simplified, some lacking arms and all lacking detailed facial features or hair. All are grounded on large spreading feet. As lost-wax castings, they bear the imprint of the artist’s hands in their modelling. This adds to their emotional weight, as does the opportunity to see them displayed together. Repetition in art is always related to emphasis or potency – think again of the imprints of hands on cave walls or the drawings by Braidwood’s school children for Two Fires. Yet, taken singly, each figure strikes a particular note and gathers its own intensity, like a lone tree on a hill.

Victoria’s exhibition also speaks on an external level about contemporary art and how she sees her place within a broader art-historical context. Installation art in the West has been favoured by many serious artists since the 1970s for its confronting, experiential dimension – viewers are immediately involved in the work viscerally as well as visually. ‘Girls’ Skins’ has a direct connection with the human body and the use of latex as a signifier of flesh and mortality. As such it recalls the abstract minimal works of German-born American artist Eva Hesse, who tragically died in her mid-thirties, and of Louise Bourgeois, who at the age of 98 is still making powerful installations and sculptures that speak of psychological and intellectual states. Another artist of significance for Victoria is Kiki Smith, also a German-born American, whose objects and drawings of internal body organs carry potent symbolic weight.

Victoria’s representational bronze figures overturn the traditional idea of the artist’s model. The figures are vessels or receptacles for the emotions rather than objects of the male gaze. They have a dynamic sense of movement – not in the manner of Degas’ small bronze dancers which some of you may have seen recently at the National Gallery of Australia – but as symbolic references. While bronze sculptures are normally associated with public art and larger-than-life heroic (usually male) figures, Victoria has sought to use this traditional medium for an art that is small, intimate, human, speaking mainly of women – or of the Earth as Woman.

So in this exhibition we have the one and the many, the hard and the soft, the obvious and the hidden, the fragile and the strong, all speaking of women’s life experience and spirituality. Victoria’s quest is to present issues of women’s identity in a new way; to make work that seeks to heal the classic Western mind/body split. Her work prompts us all – men and women – to go beyond the superficial and explore the deep, transformative aspects of our human nature.

Laura Murray Cree

1 May 2009