Tag Archives: mexican artist

Newest addition to The Skull Collection

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Small Dancing Skeleton

Earlier this week I spent the day with Gary, an old friend and travelling companion.

He gave me what he described as “A dancing skeleton“, a 9cm plastic jointed marionette that was part of a Day of The Dead hoard we’d collected while in Mexico City and Oaxaca State in October and November 1993.

Jointed plastic marionette. height 9 cm. Collected by G. Ruddick Mexico 1993. Donated 2015.

Jointed plastic marionette. height 9 cm. Collected by G. Ruddick Mexico 1993. Donated 2015.

Gary recalled the guy who sold it to us making a line of the little fellas leap and dance, but…more…

Strawberry Fair Armpit Hair

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…Similarly, the radical lesbian photographer, Della Grace, championed this theatrical masculine posturing during the drag-king craze of the early 1990’s. If I remember aright, drag-kings were gangs of beautiful light-hearted lesbian women who invaded clubs dressed in mens suits. They greased back their hair, stuffed paunches under their shirts, packed dildos in their pants & faked or grew facial hair. They were playing with notions of gender identity, & having a laugh. Della Grace immersed herself in this scene & photographed it from within. When asked how she came to grow a moustache herself, she replied that she just stopped plucking it….READ MORE…

Skull Collection

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This being the season of the Wild Hunt I thought I’d post up my work on cataloguing my Skull Collection, which I am archiving in the Gallery.

Skull Collection – number 1
The first skull in my Skull Collection was a housewarming gift, left by an unidentified previous occupant, who in a pique of randomly directed maliciousness thought to curse me. Perhaps it was directed at the landlady – a plausible enough explanation, but I chose at the time to see it as my own personal gift-curse. A bit like having three wishes to bestow, except it wasn’t, it was a single dead-eyed curse.
I was an undergraduate in Northampton in the late 1980s at the time, and I had just moved out of shared accommodation into a self-contained bedsit…read more…

Link to Images

Frida Kahlo

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The Wall of Girls
5. Frida Kahlo

5a. Frida Kahlo

“…Twentieth century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo positively celebrated her own excess facial hair – a so-called mono-brow, in numerous of her self-portraits she accentuates it almost into the brow of a third eye, a bindi, an organ of inner sight, pituitary gland…read more…”