Thursday, October 30, 2008

Old work part3 Mummies

These are some drawings I did of Chilean Mummies. Charcoal, ink and chalk on paper, I may have mushed in some gesso too. I think I ran into the original images of these in a National Geographic or something. I don’t know a lot about them but if memory serves many of them were children. Here is an actual picture of one:
First they were mummified by desiccation and then much later they were reconstructed with the masks and wrappings.

Then they were left or buried overlooking the sea.


They captured me.
Texture, mystery, age, freakiness I dunno why but I find these both creepy and compelling. I have a hard time trying to figure out why someone would create them in the first place. A photo of them half buried in boxes of sand is really fascinating to me, again not quite sure why and yes I know it is a fairly disturbing thing to be attracted to. As a general rule I’m quite normal but I am willing to accept my weirdness on occasion so I went with it and made the drawings.It is doubly weird in my case because I am really freaked out by dolls and ventriloquism dummies I just don’t like them at all… empty glassy eyes staring at you. It is just too easy to imagine them being possessed by some evil entity and brrrrr…Happy Halloween!

2 comments:

Elisefilt said...

Hallo
I know that feeling of beeing drawn to something even though I find it repelling.
I think somone in the past loved thair children very much. The did their best to "preserve" them for eternily life. Now we found them centuries later.

Happy halloween too.

Elise

alsokaizen said...

hi elsie
Its funny isn't it? that something inanimate can create such a push/pull dynamic for us
thanks for stopping by!