Thursday 31 March 2011

To Cure the Soul By Means of the Senses: LGBT Drawings


To Cure The Soul By Means Of The Senses, 2011
3 x A2 Pencil and Cum on Drawing Paper
Image © Leo Cohen 2011


A triptych of stylised drawings exploring LGBT identity, sexual icons in juxtaposition with a six- point star. It presents three cases for desire, which becomes appealable to heterosexual/lesbian/homosexual/bisexual/transsexual audiences.

I often use sperm as a visual metaphor for sexuality. Within the star segments each sperm leads or chases towards a hole in the intersections. I drew this to symbolise the fact that every hole is sacred and beautiful and that without each and every hole of the human body one would not be able to live. They should be loved, cherished and understood as should each person and their sexual preference. The drawings offer a form of sexual spirituality becoming accepted within the boundaries of the six-point star.

This work is an ongoing series in which I have created marriages and beautiful spaces for different sets of values to join harmoniously together. Nietzsche claims that art "is more powerful than knowledge because it desires life, whereas knowledge attains as its final goal - only annihilation". Through these artworks I hope to build a powerful home for what to some might seem like oppositions to exist. For Nietzsche, oppositions as we see them "do not exist in themselves" but express "only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites". We should not see things in the world as oppositions and different, but rather as "transitions".

Whilst Nietzsche challenges the basis of the subject/object distinction, later becoming important to the field of Semiotics and especially "the crisis of representation", I am also interested in the misappropriation/misuse of/and education surrounding symbols.