SIMPLICITY 6159

OUCH!

By Monica Mayer

I saw it and it hurt.

The work made by Irma Sofia Poeter in the humid grounds of the leafy Sculpture Garden of Xalapa, Veracruz was felt on my own skin.

The artist dug the earth and created various forms. Then she placed a steel band around the perimeter, flush with the ground. At first, it reminded me of the cutters with which my mother, my brothers and I used to make Christmas cookies when I was a child. The forms that penetrated the grass leaving uncovered the deep brown color of the earth are the pieces of the pattern of a coat, the Simplicity 6156, coat A at double scale.

How funny! I thought, Poeter is undressing the earth with a coat. Uncovers something that supposedly is used to cover. She uses what should be made to protect and makes evident its vulnerability. It is as paradoxical as the relationship between art and nature, that in this garden generally sustain a respectful dialogue, but in this piece becomes a direct confrontation.

The piece also reminded me of the paper clothing with which I dressed my paper dolls. However, when I saw the cloth hanger hanging from a tree that is part of the installation, again it made me think. I started thinking that the hanger was left hanging because only if something extraordinary happened, the coat will not materialize. This coat that should have been, will not be. Although we could think that it could be a promise of the earth to cover us, something that I thought impossible after everything we have done. For some reason it reminded me of the painting that Frida Kahlo painted in 1933, My dress hangs here, with the clothing of the artist hanging in the middle of Manhattan, making evident her absence. The figure of Ana Mendietta traced on the earth, also comes to mind.

Although my first reactions to this piece take me to my childhood, I do not think I am in front of an innocent piece. In childhood the patterns imposed on us generally accompany us all our life, sometimes as guides to navigate reality, other like scars so deep and outlined like the ones this piece marks.

I do not want to keep the appreciation of this installation/intervention in the past. However, if I take this condition to my adulthood, it could be terrifying. The figure of a woman (or her coat) dismembered, her parts scattered on the floor, half buried, make me think of the Coyolxauhqui and the women murder in Ciudad Juarez, where their bodies mutilated have been found, barely covered by the desert sand.

With time, the hard steel of this piece will start to oxidize, abandoning her industrial tone to integrate to the earth that surrounds it. I suppose that little by little it will integrate to the landscape and will soften a little. Time also will nurture with all the ideas and sensations that awaken in its observer, because this is clear, like a coat, this piece is polysemic and it adapts perfectly to the body of who wears it.