Robyn Freeman

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

All My Desire Is Before You

Abjection is the infection of a membrane. An uncanny moment when a border that is meant to separate two things lets them leak into each other. It is this uncanniness that acts as a primordial reminder of the fragility of what it means to be (to be solid? To be clean?).

Can I be without a membrane?

Through sins of the flesh and redemption through repentance: Christianity’s obsession with morality acts as an attempt to purify the abject: to clean the body that leaks.

Focusing on the paradox of simultaneous desire, disgust, shame and pleasure; I am concerned with a moment of time – a breath – in which all can exist at once. What do I do with the fact that I desire the thing that disgusts me; that I seek pleasure in the thing that brings me shame? 

Organs ingest and digest. They swell, rub and penetrate: spilling and leaking bodily fluids and excrement. These things that are at once a-part-of and separate-from the body cause a disruption of one’s understanding of the self.

There is a tension. A tightness and an uncertainty exist in the moment between when you look and when you look away. A moment of desire before it turns to disgust.

Are these my insides?