My Moon is a visual reconstruction of the internal emotional experience I had when reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. An icy arm reached out of the bowels of the book and settled around my throat and I felt myself choking with fear and grief as I imagine many of the characters did at different times. The danger of a woman’s unfettered sexuality was the most powerful theme in the book to me, and the most personal.
I was also captivated by the imagery of the pickle factory and the badly packaged jars, with their dripping oil, expanding moldy mango chutneys and peeling labels. The compartmentalization of everyone and everything seemed to be echoed by these parochial and awkward vessels.
I choose photography as the medium to express my personal vision of this book because I wanted to give form to the very real experience I had reading it. I felt the photographic image would make it ‘real’ for the viewer of the card and draw them in as I had been.
Nudity was an effective vehicle in this regard. The inverted naked woman represents the character of Amu on a very surface level and in a deeper way shouts of the drownings of all the characters, the subdued immersion of women, and the collapse of the feminine through death and murder in the consciousness of religions, nations and global society. The motif of drowning is strong in the book, and marries very well with moon’s personal medicine of shadows, madness and grappling for truth in the dark.
The drowning woman’s luminous skin is torn by the sharp shards of the crisp cut jars and pieces of her start to fill the jars. The juxtaposition of these two elements conveys the depth and breadth of ‘shame-drowning’ and the division and loss of self.