Paper 3, Semester 2 excerpt

Donna Haraway’s ideas complement my own experiments with creating “chimeras” that draw from my diverse identity, and legitimise my urge to hybridise its discordant elements. Paglia’s take on the resilience of paganism and its association with the “feminine”, supplements the aesthetics and themes I employ in exploring dark, abject, magically ritualistic subjects.

The recurring feline motif in my work continues to function as a reference to the “feminine”, the dark, the wild, the untamed, the independent, the secretive, the private and the intimate, for me. The cat’s simultaneous embodiment of the ethereal and the corporeal, makes it the perfect intermediary between this and other, more amorphous existences. I was recently struck by another pertinent connection when reading about Venus the Chimera Cat, whose face is split down the middle as a result of a rare genetic condition, that causes radically different appearances to manifest in the same animal. The left side of her face is that of an orange tabby with a blue eye, and the other side is half of a black cat with a green eye (David Mizejewski, 2012). This fits in nicely with my cyborg/chimera creations.

Venus Chimera Cat