Em Kettner’s miniature, figurative sculptures are contextualised by the artist’s experience of muscular dystrophy, intimacy and the fragility of embodied interdependence. She weaves silk and cotton threads onto fragmented porcelain structures, creating tiny beds and colourfully-patterned surfaces, leaving out the limbs and heads of her tiny characters. Whether sickbeds or love-beds or both, the sculptures and their figures reference the physical fragility and mutual support of Kettner’s experience. The miniature scale of her works alludes to votative objects placed on altars as pleas for the relief of pain or illness. Eroticism, religion, joy and ecstasy intertwine in the artist’s delicate figures, challenging the idea of a “normal” body and the hurtful stereotypes about the disability community.
Written by Goldsmiths CCA ...
