Buttigieg, Lawrence

Together with a regular female model, I produce mixed-media box-assemblages whose iconography mostly hinges around her body’s prurient parts. One process we engage in is the use of spatulas to gently spread uncured silicone across her skin. Sometimes it is her shaved vulva; other times it might be her breasts. This is the first step toward the manufacture of high-precision moulds that are used to produce true-to-life simulacra of her body fragments to be housed inside the box-assemblage. As the moulds are taken directly off the subject’s skin, she becomes the unequivocal author of her own representations. Our relationship is nurtured through routine appointments; while each rendezvous is defined by the creative processes involved, more importantly, it is underpinned by the trust we share.

My paper discusses the essence of this trust, and looks into its subtle, yet powerful, and transformative nature. When Ruth is present, this shared emotion not only permeates my studio, but emanates a sense of wellbeing and safety. Notwithstanding the states of vulnerability and caution through which we expose ourselves to each other, it transforms the physical closeness into an arcane kind of intimacy.

The aforementioned affection enables us to communicate in silence, or with the merest of words and gestures; it imbues our encounters with eloquence and complicity. Trust allows us to collaborate, or rather to immerse ourselves, into a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas and actions that favour our reciprocal confirmation of self-worth—feelings that, as a matter of course, are then transposed into the box-assemblage.

Besides pursuing a career in architecture, Lawrence Buttigieg is also an artist and freelance researcher; in 2014 he was awarded his PhD from Loughborough University. For more than eighteen years, the recurrent theme of Buttigieg’s studio-work and research is essentially the representation of womanhood. Consequent to his practice-led doctoral research, he creates box-assemblages––three-dimensional, body-themed, artefacts––through which his association with the female subject is taken to an acutely intense level. By means of these artworks Buttigieg examines concepts of alterity and selfhood, and challenges the dominant role of male subjectivity in the western world. Furthermore, the box-assemblage not only allows him to explore the spiritual with the aim of exploiting that which is Other in the western theological tradition, namely God and the Divine, but also to draw links between the feminine and the transcendental.

Return to:

• Panels
• Overview