Daphne Rising
Thus the god and the nymph sped on, one made swift by hope and one by fear;
but he who pursued was swifter, for he was assisted by love's wings. He gave the
fleeing maidenno respite, but followed close on her heels, and his breath touched the
locks that lay scattered on her neck, till Daphne's strength was spent, and she grew
pale and weary with the effort of her swift flight. Then she saw the waters of the
Peneus: 'O father,' she cried, 'help me! If you rivers really have divine powers, work
some transformation, and destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well!'
Her prayer was scarcely ended when a deep languor took hold on her limbs, her soft
breast was enclosed in thin bark, her hair grew into leaves, her arms into branches,
and her feet that were lately so swift were held fast by sluggish roots, while her face
became the treetop. Nothing of her was left, except her shining loveliness.
– Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book I
Daphne Rising is a meditation on body memory, trauma, and the subversion of taught and/or
imposed behaviours and states through visual and tactile installations. Here the myth of Daphne and Apollo is a guiding narrative and image, and the use of the myth and its interpretation are informed by a psychoanalytical approach.
Like many young women, my skin once turned to bark like Daphne’s. What I call the “Daphne
tree body,” borrowing a term employed by philosopher Norman O. Brown in his poetic essay
“Daphne, or Metamorphosis,” is a state in which, as a means to protect themselves from the
touch and attention of men (whether due to specific traumatic events or due to the less radical yet
persistent trauma of blossoming in the world of men), young women turn themselves into
"Daphnes," meaning they shut themselves off from the world and surround themselves with layers
of protection, frozen in a state of preserved purity. In a world that insists that the purity of women
(no matter their age) is sacred and necessary, but in which it is also (more often than not) taken
from them early on, whether by the male gaze, a man’s touch, or by the world’s expectations,
paralyzing itself in that so-called “pure,” virginal state (whether the woman is actually a virgin or
not), is sometimes the best way the young female psyche finds to protect itself from the shock of
coming into contact with various forms of sexual violence. As psychoanalyst Maria Taveras
writes in her article, “Transformation of the Feminine,” “From a psychoanalytical perspective,
when evasion fails as a defense, the transformation finally ‘succeeds’ as a defense." According to
P.M.C. Forbes Irving, this transformation is an escape, with “the tree perpetuat[ing] her virgin
state,” a state in which, as James Hillman writes, “the psyche is driven into vegetative
regression.” Her innocence stolen, the young girl seeks to retrieve it far from where it was taken.
On the outside, we have the laurel, that emblematic symbol of victory, and its “shining
loveliness;" but on the inside, this state is one of isolation and fear. How does the Daphne tree
body feel? It is a lonely place; stuffy and dark. In this hermetically sealed haven-realm of bark
there is no air, no light, no space. No sound can escape the enclosed bulb, and nothing – no touch,
no voice – can truly pierce through. While the tree body is about preservation, it is also a denial
of the body’s true form: flesh and fluids, sexuality, transformation; subject to time’s influence and
experience’s etchings; mobile, extensive, porous, biological. This denial is not the one we find in the
photoshopped images of models in magazines or in stories like that of John Ruskin’s disgust of his
wife’s body, so troubled was he by the difference between her “imperfect,” hairy form and the “ideal”
marble statues he adored, although it is very much influenced by it. This is a denial of the body itself,
and of the self, as well as a denial of the world.
An existence suspended. Experiencing violent, traumatic contact (whether sexual, emotional, or
physical), makes us “leave our bodies,” to use Eve Ensler’s phrase, but it also takes us out of the
world and into an altogether other space. Untouched and unheard, to move through the world in
this state feels like being dropped on the wrong planet, and the very idea of coming into actual
contact with the material can seem like certain death.
The Daphne body is both a premature death and a return to the womb, and the drawings I began
to produce automatically when I started to become conscious of this state, following a dream
about Daphne, took not the form of trees, but of gnarly, bulb-like cocoons: both tomb and womb.
The primary metaphor here is not that of the butterfly, a most favorite symbol of transformation
(although the idea is to ultimately emerge changed), but, rather, that of the continuous “in-utero”
states of decomposition the caterpillar goes through in the chrysalis. From that permanent,
perpetual state of terrified panic one must find a way to emerge, and that must begin with
working first on the inside, taking things apart, peeling at the layers, chipping away at the bark.
Decomposition is inevitable when there is no air or light.
Of course, the suspended introspection can only go on for so long, and comes the time when the
shell must be broken, as described in an oft-used quote attributed to Anaïs Nin, “And the day
came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
The sculptures in the photographs above, which I call Daphnes, are a means to externalize the
state of isolation, immobility, and suffocation that this condition imposes. In each case, multiple
photographs depict their symbolic destruction as they are forced into coming into contact with the
elements and the world, unraveling the Daphne state. Through these transformations, the shells
become objects of what Rebecca Solnit calls the Exquisite, an aesthetic that “affirms the biological
body against prior artistic norms” and “restores…the squishy, mobile, mutable stuff of bodies in
process;” returning the body to its material, hungry, earthy, sexual nature, and to space and time.
“Untouched, we disappear,” writes poet David Whyte. To allow the world's touch once again is
both an affirmation of one’s own material form and of one’s participation in the world, and is a
celebration of the “transgressible boundaries of the feminine, the liminalities and permeabilities
that are denied in the masculinized ideal body.” Thus, the following images serve as an assertion
of the body as juice and matter, and of its interconnectedness with the world that surrounds it. It is
also a declaration of independence, a reclaiming of the body and of the self from the holds of
trauma and from those who may have inflicted it. A Daphne risen.