Flowers of a beautiful nightmare

What part of the nightmare addicts us, so irrevocably, to it? Though we tear at the sheets, hands and back clammy with sweat, the clack of unknowns over the silence of the city, we are drawn to the rush of glandular fluids triggered by the macabre’s cool embrace. We yearn for it, laying down good coin to quench the erasable thirst that follows us. Is this related to the innate cruelty of ourselves? A projection of sorts? It has been said that homo sapiens is the only animal capable of gratuitous cruelty—the schoolyard bully, the impatient throng awaiting the first crash at Indy, beer-sodden and sunburned, the novel curiosity that has driven some to war. And what exactly of curiosity? What of curiosity followed by the ecstatic plunge to discovery? That our horrors retain, with reflection, a seamy attraction is obvious. Shock value has become an artworld bon mot, discussed as artists once contrived to verbalize color. What does it say of the fact that the monolithic tragedy of a child’s death, of disfigurement, elicits from us an almost uncensored curiosity? We are stricken to feel a greater pain for the theft of youth. Empathy, at least, for what will never be known, books never read, languages never learned, love never made. . . . The poet and novelist Jim Harrison expressed this in verse:

You were so old we could not weep; only the blood of the young those torn off earth in a night’s sickness, the daughter lying beside you who became nothing so long ago— she moves us to terror.

Figure 1.

Christina Bothwell, Living with Ghosts, 1996. Clay and mixed media, 54 x 50 x 22 inches. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.

Christina Bothwell, Spirit Child, 1996. Mixed media; 71 x 18 x 23 inches. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.

Christina Bothwell, Open Heart (left), 1996. Clay and mixed media, 65 x 21 x 23 inches. Ecstasies of St. Germaine (right), 1996. Clay and mixed media, 56 x 22 x 22 inches. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.

Christina Bothwell, Chair for Conjoined Twins, 1996. Clay with mixed media, 32 x 29 x 15 inches. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Christina Bothwell faces her own nightmare and her own sensitive curiosity objectively and gracefully. Her show Living with Ghosts explored the mythos, or symbolism, of nightmare and curiosity, melding the beautiful and the macabre with deft strength and invention. Her sculptures present the ashen remains of a world we could never know. Her figures, children, Siamese twins, dogs, and ghostly women, are seen and translated as if relics or survivors, perhaps spirits. Using clay and mixed media (straw, wire, burlap, antiques, and goose dung), Bothwell gives her creations a sense of life or life-in-death and aged character. The work is pit-fired, affording its aesthetics a folk-like allure, a charm that grimly highlights the eerie divinity in Bothwell’s creations.

Spirit Child has a doll’s torso and a charred, whitened face; its legs descend to clubbed feet in misshapen bandages, one leg nearly twice as long as the other. The child sits in a wooden swing, an antique hoop skirt frame hovering below. Living with Ghosts has two figures, one doll-like, the other an obese monstrosity of an infant, the blackened arms hanging as if mere stumps—a comment perhaps on the humor of time and evolutionary change. The figures rest atop a wicker pram, as if waiting for someone to push them into a next life, a life where their curdled dreams could perhaps breathe once more. A watery sadness seeps from the work, the disconcerting surface understanding now giving way to the seduction of its pastoral organics.

Perhaps the strongest of these immobile puppets in tableaux are Open Heart, Ecstasies of St. Germaine, and Feet in the Soil. All...