Anne Raine Embodied Geographies: subjectivity and materiality in the work of Ana Mendieta

Freud - Uncanny = strangely familiar 

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - Matrixial Subjectivity = 'In the maxtrxial model that hereby will be knitted in a non-linear way, the feminine/prenatal encounter is a non-phallic sex difference issue, primarily for women. I articulate it around the the rapport with female bodily specificity in the Real (womb) as inside and/or outside, as in-forming an unconscious zone The Feminine/Prenatal Weaving in Maxtrixial Subjectivity-as-Encounter pg 367 

This text is pertinent to my practice, because of locating a female figure in a landscape. I am totally aware of the political tightrope I am treading and the historical weight of such subjectivity.

My fears are that my work will be undervalued because of the relationship in art  between the female body and 'nature' and the (male) politics of taming both. This is compounded by both seen historically as unpredictable, messy, fecund and unruly (look back at my MA research paper) I also don't want to be categorized as 'new age' or psychic, which is a trope attached to women working within these genres.

Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth...I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs...[in] an omnipresent female force, the after-image of being encompassed within the womb 2

Lucy Lippard has written that visiting ancient stone circles and other prehistoric aesthetic-sym-bolic sites prompted her 'to perceive places as spatial metaphors for temporal distance', and to consider how this dialectic between space and time might relate to 'the crucial connections between individual desires (to make something, to hold something) and the social values that determine what we make and why' 3  pg 294

Early in the twentieth century, D H. Lawrence wrote a fascinating essay 8 in which he argues that the English tradition of ladscaoe painting is rooted in anxiety about the body, and represents an escape from physicality into 'opticle systems' pg 295

I want to think of her (Mendieta) work as inscribing not female or 'natural' essences, but a gendered physicality, memory, desire and representation, accress a concrete material terrain always already marked by politics and history. In my view , Mendieta's work does represent and engagement with self-portraiture, but one that is not at all simple, and is crucially involved in what I am thinking of as a diffuse and multi-leveled problematic of figure and ground. pg 297