The Origin

Description

I did not search for this form — I recognized it. It had been here long before me, inscribed in the wood the way a cave entrance is inscribed into a mountainside: not a metaphor, but a fact of the terrain. I merely removed what had been concealing it from view.

This is “Origin” — a direct reference to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. The wood here speaks of the same thing: the threshold through which everything living enters the world. The vulva as an image here is neither a hint nor a euphemism — it is the structure of the wood itself, a form the olive tree carried within it long before I ever touched it.

On the outside, the form is closed, almost austere — dense, smooth, self-contained, like a body holding stillness. But once the eye enters the cleft, an entirely different density opens up within: tangled, nervous lines, a narrow shoot of interior carving, as though the wood itself were baring what it usually keeps hidden beneath its bark. This contrast — coarse on the outside, fragile within — I did not invent. It was there in the trunk from the beginning; I only let it come into the light.

Wood makes this subject chaste and explicit at once. Abstraction here is not a way of hiding, but a way of speaking about the body in a language that does not illustrate it literally. The viewer either reads the image at once, or simply sees a beautiful, unsettling curve of living material — and both readings are correct.

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