The Fire Ants
The Fire Ants
​18” X 22”
Mixed media, wildebeest, driftwood, silver​​
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My battle with the fire ants began in my garden. Their sting was potent, raising painful welts and causing swelling that extended far past the original source of the injury. I was trying to encourage them to leave. They were an invasive species and they had overrun every part of my garden.
But one day as I dug around the base of an old plant, with the hundreds of tiny shining red bodies swirling all about me, I discovered a long dead and hollowed root where the fire ants had wintered, piercing its walls to create the most exquisite pattern of lacework.
It was to be an incredible gift that was to give expression to my suffering and form the basis for this sculpture. For with it, I created her spinal cord.
My body has become a fragile vessel, where relentless and debilitating symptoms now overrun every part of me. This hollow form where I reside, is approaching uninhabitable. But even as my thoughts turn inwards, this piece looms so much larger - echoing the sorrow of this graceful planet, that gives refuge still, to all of those who relentlessly pierce its boundaries.
And I cling to its beauty even as I lament.
This sculpture of a woman is formed from a wildebeest skull turned upside down.
The curling black/brown horns form her legs- wide at the the hips, they slowly narrow down to a fine point where the feet should be. Her body protrudes upwards from the skull, as the two wide and empty eye sockets form her hips.
Her buttocks is defined by the top of the head, at the base of the horns. She is seated tilted back, with her bottom only barely in contact with the surface of her pedestal. Her legs are spread wide open by the sweep of the horns. They are off the ground and up in the air, as she sits literally on the edge of her seat.
Her arms are formed from blackened driftwood. The right arm is merely a stump. Next to it, a single breast, made from an elongated, soft pink spiral seashell, droops down and off to one side. Her left arm is complete, and emulates the dark and curving, pointed horns that form her legs. It reaches tentatively forward, indicating her lower abdomen, as we view the rift, through the skull’s broken nasal passages, where her viscera are now exposed.
Her hair is formed from dark rough tree bark. Her face, formed from bone, is smooth and featureless, with only a simple, slightly raised ridge along the center. It is upturned to the heavens, in a stance that expresses both her rapture and her pain.
Her neck is an elongated and twisted stick. The viscera are attached all along its surface, going deep into the body cavity, and can be fully viewed by lifting the head and neck right out from the skull.
Her little heart, formed from a little seashell, with soft hints of pink and sienna, and with delicate sea worm tubes for the vessels, has popped right out and sits on the edge of the large rift in her torso, up by the top of her chest.
Below it, we can glimpse her esophagus and further down, the many twists of bowel, formed from fragile and transparent, pink sea worm tubes. Her stomach is a knotted root and her spleen is made from the grey discarded cocoon of a little mud wasp.
From the back of this sculpture we can view the exquisite lacework of the long, twisted and hollow root, punctuated with tiny garnets and small bits of filigreed silver, that is her perforated spinal cord.
Her kidneys, made from sterling silver - blackened and patinated by the torch, are exposed. Beneath them, the hearing cochlea of the wildebeest form the ovaries, with fallopian tubes of sterling silver and small pearls for eggs, nesting deep inside.
This section of the skull is can be removed to expose the cranial cavity.
This section of the skull is can be removed to expose the cranial cavity. Inside we find the womb, made from the large and puffy and silken outer cocoon of a giant moth.
Attached to one end is a doorway with a blackened and delicate sterling silver filigree cover, embedded with tiny topaz cabochons.
On the inside resides the smaller inner cocoon, where a spiralled, newly forming baby carp attached to a sterling silver umbilicus, can be seen.
Behind it, in the background, tiny sterling silver spheres depict the Little Dipper with the North Star.
Photo Credits: Marina Dempster