Ella writes:
I grew up having an extreme phobia for the inside of the human body, particularly the skeleton. I still don’t understand the origin of this phobia, but as a small child I realized at some point that my body too “contained” a skeleton, which resulted in many waves of fear during my childhood and even later in life. All I could do was wait until it was over, since I could not run away from it, like people normally tend to do when something terrifies them. Fortunately, human beings do have a weird way of “forgetting” their bodies in a normal state and it only comes into our consciousness on occasion, such as in the case of sickness. I did tend to forget my body in that sense for most of the time but it would come back to me often. I have grown over this fear, or at least to the point where it doesn’t paralyze me anymore and it has grown into a fascination too. What I want to investigate in my work is what we exist of, to get a grip on that weird “tissue” that we are. We don’t just have a body, we are a body.
I made this piece during my stay at the Vermont Studio Center in march 2010.
