
Mother Goddess
- Publisher
- Baron Books
- Year
- 2024
- Specifications
- Hardback
28 x 34 cm
120 pages
Introduction by Charlotte Jansen
An artefact of Pinar Yolaçan's visual explorations of the body along the themes of gender and otherness, with photographs from several series across her career: Mother Goddess (2009), White Sands (2010), Like a Stone (2011) and Carmel (2011). The female body is at once subject and medium, and its anatomical forms are altered, abstracted or obscured with fabric, latex, plaster, mesh and paint, so that bodies are caught in transmutation between the living and the inorganic. In Mother Goddess and Like a Stone bodies veer between being and object as the artist invokes historic sculptural forms, including a pre-Neolithic Anatolian fertility vessel, classical poses and Ancient Egyptian sculpture. For Mother Goddess she cast people from her native Turkey whose bodies resembled fertility-goddess statues, and for Like a Stone she recruited models on fetish forums; these voluptuous bodies resist modern western beauty conventions and challenge who is allowed to be photographed and seen. Echoes of club kid and kink subcultures give the work a fetishistic, unsettling eroticism.