Melancholia (1999)

“In contrast to illness, health runs the risk of appearing shallow: a mute version of an unexamined life. Once the organs break their silence, we experience both our bodies and the world anew”.
David B. Morris
Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Hippocrates’ physiological theory of the four humours held that the body’s state of health, and by extension the state of mind and character, depended upon a balance of four elemental fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Predominance of one humour explained temperment (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic) and even influenced specific visceral organs, planets, foods, professions and diseases. Believing there is an emotional component in all bodily states and a physical component in all mental states the artist examines symptoms of my own melancholia in detail.

 

Vertigo (cochlea and semicircular canals)
Bronze, level (plastic and fluid)
7.5” x 10” x 5”

 

Dysphoria (potatoes)
Iron, stainless steel, TUMS, glue
19” x 12” x 7”

 

Dyspnea (trachea)
Bronze, stainless steel, rubber, plastic
33” x 17” x 8”

 

Asthenia (basal ganglia)
Bronze, stainless steel, plastic, latex
9.5” x 3” x 5”

 

Sanguine Parasite (red child)
Glass, rubber, plastic, stainless steel
22” x 17” x 13”

 

Choleric Parasite (yellow youth)
Glass, rubber, plastic, stainless steel, latex
6” x 4” x 36”