Sanguine Bedtime Stories

Excerpt from "Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory" by Hannah Higgins.

"Similarly, Catya Plate's Sanguine Bedtime Stories was shown at the Lance Fung Gallery in New York in 2001. It occupies an intermedium between literature (in this case diary writing), sculpture and smell. Visitors smell small vials of blood; the interior receptors of memory fire off while visitors inhabit a red, living-room set whose fleshy tone and tactile walls suggest the interior of the human body. Here, perfuming and sculptural space are brought, literally, into the space of memory of the body and time structurally. It is elastic in space and time, suggesting intermedial points that span this continuum, even as the vials are separable from the room. Perfume and blood share longstanding association in occult philosophy: the combination recalls magic as well as the fundamental basis for the evocative power of perfume in the body's pheromones and scent organs."

Resembling medieval reliquaries, these boxy mixed-media constructions serve as contemporary contemplation on blood and its myriad associations with it like spirituality and mortality. The faded red tones staining the lace, latex and thread on the insides of these book-sized diptychs are my blood. Through the process of stitching, embroidering, pinning and binding the blood-stained canvases, and through the use of iodine and gauze, I draw attention to the vulnerability as well as the regenerative abilities of our bodies.

Catya Plate
2005