Prenatal Defenses. On the Hapticity of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt’s Objects, Poems, and Prose
The article analyzes the idea of concealing and hiding painful, personal experiences – including those related to the loss of loved ones in the Holocaust – in the art and poetry of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt (1945–2006). The idea resembles the development of an embryo and later the fetus sheltered by th...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/td, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Teksty Drugie
2024
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| נושאים: | |
| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | The article analyzes the idea of concealing and hiding painful, personal experiences – including those related to the loss of loved ones in the Holocaust – in the art and poetry of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt (1945–2006). The idea resembles the development of an embryo and later the fetus sheltered by the womb; a being unable to live independently outside the womb finds refuge in it, which gradually becomes more visible until it reaches a state when it is no longer needed and is left behind by the child. In Robb-Narbutt’s art, the prenatal stage – the concealing of experience – reaches a state of autonomy, in fact becoming the main and only stage of presenting what is most important in her work: objects withdrawn from direct contact with the recipient and directly connected to some pain, someone’s trauma. This stage is important precisely because it presents the painful – partly presumed – experience untouched by the viewer or reader and mediated through a hiding place, a box, or a stash, but also a poem, namely material and visual shelters that do not symbolize a concealment but indeed create it. However, this shelter is not temporary – as in the case of pregnancy – but permanent, and what is protected is not a simple translation of growing and dependent existence into art, nor a visualization or symbolization of a growing fetus. On the contrary, the shelter symbolically materializes the dead, the absent, and the lost, namely various dimensions of death. Present in all stages and states of Robb-Narbutt’s work, such shelter makes her art a maternal womb for the memories threatened with non-existence, most often known only to the artist and related to the history of her family and her own, personal experiences. |
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