using her own and her mother’s blood, she
created Paschal candles inscribed with dates
representing surgeries, accidents, and diagnoses from her and her mother’s personal
histories, referencing the traditional use of
Paschal candles during Easter, baptismal,
and funerary rituals.
Memorials often valorize the dead and
provide comfort for the living, turning
away from the decaying body and toward
the spiritual and symbolic, offering hope of
an abstract eternity. O’Brien’s memorials,
however, decidedly enter into the realm
of abjection, confronting the fragility of the
human form with its biological reality. In her
1982 work, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, Julia Kristeva wrote, “A wound
with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell
of sweat, of decay, does not signify death…
these body fluids, this defilement, this shit,
are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am
at the border of my condition as a living
being.”
O’Brien’s memorials, in their exaltation of
the physiological processes that make death
an inevitable part of life, are elegant and
poignant, personal and universal homages to
these conditions of human life.
You can see more at:
ShelbyOBrienArt.wix.com/shelbyobrienart
above: Your Blood, My Blood, Our Blood, clear toy candy (sugar, corn syrup, water), human blood, traditional canning jars
below: Communion Photograph Series, giclée print
Orlando’s Art Scene, v. 1.6
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