Pallet for Home

Electra on Azalea Path 

The day you died I went into the dirt, 
Into the lightless hibernaculum 
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother's heart. 

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence

I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.

Nobody died or withered on that stage.

Everything took place in a durable whiteness.

The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.

I found your name, I found your bones and all

Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence. 

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead

Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower

Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.

A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.

She uses the lens to become an apparition, a ghost, there seems to be a fascination with the ability of a body, her body to disappear.  Presence and absence, falling and disappearing from the moment.  

   There is also a very obvious exploration of fetish, sexuality in her images, but her's is the solitary experience of sexuality.  Masturbation, or violence seem to be themes in the work that relates to sexuality.  The lover having left the frame either dramatically or brutally in some cases.  The implied drama of these photos seem to reference typical drama of sexual exploration and desire.  In fact this sense of loss or longing seems to be present in all of her work.

There is a very definite Surealist influence on her work,  it has the obvious influences of Man Ray, and the surealist tendency to objectify the female form. 

Her series of bodies in architecture are haunting and sureal.  When I look at them they are portraits of not only a often headless body emerging from walls, struggling in architectural elements,  they also have a desolation and lonliness to them.  The house has long been abandoned and the female body within it seems very alone, ghostlike often.  I feels less like a study of female roles with in the house and more portraits of abandonment or trappings,  These photos are etheral and haunting. A portrait of the secrets held in walls, in what a place remembers after the inhabitants have abandoned it.