Dorothea Tanning

Upon making these soft sculptures, which would span five years of creative making, she wanted them to be ‘fugacious’ – a word I’d never heard of, meaning fleeting, and ‘fragile’ (Tanning, D. 2022). They carry that vulnerability in their very making. That bare exposed pink, like in that of Nue couchée, is precisely that; risky, nude, yielding, curled up into itself in some sort of foetal position. The process of making these works involved endless sewing, stuffing, pulling, and chopping ‘close to lust’ (Tanning, D. 2022), and they do feel lusting. Tanning also describes them as a ‘family of sculptures’, and you can see their relations, with a ‘lifespan something like ours’ (Tanning, D. 2022), pulling that sense of being and humanness a little closer.

I am interested in how she creates these suggestive bodily forms, and I find the moments of their ‘coupling’ (Tate, 2022) with functional furniture and domestic spaces intriguing. While we depart in subject matter – as Tanning was inspired by Surrealism – she ‘gives life to forms that have never existed before’ (Tate, 2019). I am looking at these soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning to help me find my own softer materials to work with. Just because these works might be tender and quieter in their making, sensuous in colours and materials, does not mean they carry any less weight.