For those of you who missed Christine Dixie’s intimate and exclusive walkthrough of her latest exhibition, The Binding, we take a brief look at this beautiful and bazaar exhibition and provide some of the meaning, metaphors and motivations behind the toy soldiers and nude child images.
The meaning
For those of you who missed Christine Dixie’s intimate and exclusive walkthrough of her latest exhibition, The Binding, we take a brief look at this beautiful and bazaar exhibition and provide some of the meaning, metaphors and motivations behind the toy soldiers and nude child images.
The meaning
Her exhibition displays six prints and six sculptures of her son. The piece is loosely based on the biblical story of Isaac and Abraham, a tale which she refers to as ‘the binding’. Binding refers to the very old practice involving the binding of a human before it was put on the altar for sacrifice. In the ancient tale, Isaac is nearly sacrificed and is replaced with a Ram .
The boy symbolically dies and is reborn through the hand of the father. Dixie says the act of saving the child is a sign of fatherhood and the father-son relationship is at the heart of the exhibition. She adds that her work is about “exploring male identity” and has to do with a mother witnessing her son becoming a man and the horrors that may come with that.
Her son was six-years-old when Dixie photographed him and used his images for the prints and sculptures. She describes the age six as a “very transitional age”, where a boy starts moving from his mother’s world to that of his father’s. At this age boy’s move to schools where they now have to wear ties around their necks as they transition between pre-primary school and formal school, something more closely associated with being a man. Also historically young Spartan boys had to leave their mother’s homes and move to the army camps of their fathers.
The prints
The exhibition displays 6 life size prints of Daniel. These prints combine etching and collagraph techniques.
The first piece, ‘To sleep’ and last print ‘To dream’ of the collection are of the sleeping boy partially covered by a blanket. Dixie says the blanket represents the warmth and comfort linked with a mother while the toy gun which lies next to him represents the dangers of the masculine world.
The second piece, ‘Bind’, is of a boy bound tightly in bandages, seemingly unaware of his sacrifice.
In the third print, ‘Burning’, the boy lies in a Christ like stance with his hands open ,as if showing his wounds where he was nailed to the cross. He confronts the viewer for the first time in this scene as he lies completely naked with his eyes wide open almost as though awoken from a nightmare. The viewer here takes the place of the father, looking at his child.
In ‘Offering’, the fourth image, the body of the child is completely covered with a sheepskin (Isaac and Abraham had a Ram substituted for the child sacrifice), possibly foreseeing his own sacrifice or ‘skinning’.
In the fifth image, ‘Blind’, the child seems entirely obliterated with his body submerged like a foetus under the blanket, as if his stance would protect him from the sacrifice.
The sculptures
There is a row of six beds which are covered in cloth and each bed sits directly below the prints. Dixie says that these beds can represent an altar or an operating table. On each bed there is a mirror image or shadow of the sleeping child which are made up by a mass of plastic toy soldiers which are perfectly fitted to create life size figures of the boy.
Dixie says she had to cut some of the plastic toys when creating the image of the sleeping child in order for them to fit perfectly. This cutting adds meaning and can be associated with the violent process of cutting and chopping limbs to fit into regiment.
One may never fully understand and appreciate the abstract mind of this artistic genius, but this exhibition is a must see and impressive by all standards. The exhibition runs until August 13th at The Albany History Museum with an intimate walkabout with Christine Dixie at 14h00 on Thursday.
