Weltschmerz: Demeter mourning for Persephone
Presented in At the Violet Hour, a group exhibition at Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate, UK, curated by Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp.
Exhibition information
The starting point for this installation was Hans (Jean) Arp's sculpture Demeter, which I associated with the threat of nuclear war. Demeter's grief over the loss of her daughter, Persephone, becomes an expression of Weltschmerz: sorrow and weariness in response to the state of the world.
The installation brings together four elements, moving between mythology, popular entertainment, the making of an artwork and the pursuit of attention.
Singing. Chiara Williams, one of the exhibition's curators, sings fragments of familiar hit songs. Detached from their music, the lyrics become banal and repetitive. The video uses this banality to suggest a wider cultural decline.
Demeter mourning for Persephone. A video shows me making a sculpture inspired by Evelyn De Morgan's painting Demeter Mourning for Persephone. The female figure is shaped by a male artist, turning the creative process into an image of control and obedience.
How to deseed a pomegranate. A practical tutorial of the kind found on YouTube refers to the pomegranate seeds that bind Persephone to the underworld in the Greek myth.
Dick pic. The explicit image refers to Hades' abduction and rape of Persephone, and to the sexual violence and unequal relations between men and women in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It also serves a more immediate purpose: attracting attention. Its deliberately cheap appeal risks eclipsing the rest of the installation. In doing so, the work uses the very mechanism of spectacle and distraction that it criticises.
