Elizabeth Carina Sabharwal

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Thinking about my body at the butchery

Before the decay of our flesh lies a more sinister death, that of recognition, where our bodies, in their most alive form, are fragmented, assimilated and prepared for consumption, the very life of our flesh erased. My practice examines this severing between body and being, where Woman becomes both consumable and abject. I interrogate the processes through which womanhood is rendered a category of flesh, where identity and agency are fragmented, erased, and made consumable. 

I am drawn to the fragile boundaries that attempt to stabilise meaning: Self / Other Human / Animal Nature / Sanitisation Flesh becomes both a material and a theoretical border between that which is controlled and that which leaks, decays, or resists containment. My work is predominantly sculptural, utilising organic materials such as bark, animal skins, bones, fat, and blood, combined with materials that evoke ideas of sanitisation and human intervention, including plaster, plastic, glass, wax, beads, and inks. In examining the tension between containment and excess, I present sculptures at the threshold of enclosure, where they begin to spill or leak beyond their boundaries. In doing so, I critique the cultural obsession with flesh as a revealer of natural truth, situating it instead within systems of representation that construct and confine womanhood. I visualise the violence inherent in essentialist ideologies of flesh by staging the female body as carcass, spectacle and commodity. 

I investigate the formation of the sexed body by actively reconstructing this process myself, fabricating the female carcass. In doing so, I engage with notions of sacrifice, transforming these carcasses into performative spectacles. Embellishments underscore the grotesque contradiction of adorning wounds and carcasses. I use these embellishments as a moment of discomfort, where even in these carcasses, most bloody, leaky representations, they are forcefully adorned. What is adorned as sacred or beautiful is simultaneously flesh, decay and abjection. By presenting female flesh as commodity, I underscore how the body circulates within culture as object, fragment, and resource, its agency absent. 

My exhibition space becomes a butchery, where I confront the “absent referent” of both animal and woman: how, in the act of consumption, individuality is erased and violence made invisible. Just as the animal becomes meat, women’s bodies are sexualised and fragmented into consumable parts, producing fragmented flesh, blood and skin, evoking both desire and repulsion while destabilising boundaries. I blur the lines between what is recognisably human and what belongs to the animal other, reframing materials in clinical and decorative gestures, highlighting how patriarchal culture both distances humans from animals and feminises animals as consumable. The forms of these sculptures remain deliberately unstable, resisting singular interpretation and inviting multiple readings that unsettle fixed identities.