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Teruko Nimura catalog essay by Danielle Wells: Twisting, stretching & sewing the delicate fibers of negligees, slips, sweaters & pantyhose, Teruko Nimura transforms these erotic accoutrements into vessels for critiquing cultural ideals of femininity. In works such as Pink Doll 1 (2007), these discarded scraps of silk & mohair -- mined from local thrift stores -- metamorphose into ambiguous bulges & cascading intestinal forms. Through this imagery, Nimura subverts the traditional erotic connotations of these materials, mingling the seductive with elements of disgust & fear. Twined & bound, the forms of Pink Doll 1 suggest bondage, mental confinement & an underlying threat of violence; yet the tactility of the fabrics, the shadowy traces of materials beneath the sheer nylon, & the subtle interplay of colors & textures render an effect that is at once deeply sensual & disquieting, both enticing & repellent. To Nimura, these erotic trappings reference two conflicting, stereotypical representations of women, as both disempowered sex objects & powerful seductresses. By interrogating the significance of these materials, Nimura intimates a more complex picture of eroticism. Nimura's keen observations & dark humor emerge in this marriage of the erotic & the grotesque, elements that reappear in her more recent works on paper, a series entitled The Spiral Spine Sketches (2008). Nimura creates these works through a stream of consciousness process, spontaneously splashing acrylic on paper & then sketching figures in response to the paint's shape & to variance in opacity & texture. For Nimura, these sketches are integral to her sculptural works, as a means of informing the development of her ideas & experimenting with formal distortions of the body. In Spiral Spine Sketches I, a light wash of red paint traces the anamorphic contours of a kneeling woman, the graceful arc of her lower back, the dimpled flesh of her buttocks, the elongated curve of her arm & one grossly swollen breast, held to her gaping mouth. Through the frankly visceral quality of her work, Nimura seeks to evoke her personal, embodied experience. Specifically, Nimura relates these works to her experiences before & after her own weight loss. As Nimura recounts,"I realized my weight was a huge part of my identity & affected the way I situated myself in the world, the expectations I had for myself, the things I assumed I could do & also how I interacted with people." Through the contorted, biomorphic forms of works such as Pink Doll 1 -- suggestive of unruly flesh & sprawling limbs -- Nimura speaks to the perceived inadequacies of women reckoning with society's unattainable feminine ideals. Furthermore, by subverting the erotic connotations of these vestments, the nightie or the silk stockings, Nimura reveals the artifice of these cultural conventions. In Nimura's words, "...it's not all soft, sweet breasts & come-hither asses." |
