Charlotte Pelissier

My initial concept for this project was to create a piece around the uncanny, I wanted to explore how the uncanny is created and what effects it can achieve. I have always been intrigued by the uncanny due to its unsettling nature. I began developing ideas of how to achieve this uneasiness and came up with the concept of creating a wax fetus sculpture. My fetus sculpture plays on the idea of alive vs dead, I took a symbol which is a signifier of life and everything pure and removed it from its home, I gave it a waxy appearance and removed define signifiers of life. By doing this I have created an uneasiness, which I argue can be uncanny. The uncanny however is hard to describe since it is an interior feeling an individual has and can not be the same for everyone. When creating this piece it was difficult to make a universal uncanny since fetuses may not be familiar to everyone, even if we all developed from one. The fetus when alive is a symbol of life, put simply. This symbol plays on purity and innocence. My fetus is constructed of wax, playing on something dead yet perhaps alive, I added the wick for the umbilical cord to show that this will never last, and life itself is temporary, in my opinion death too. Since my sculpture is a performance, I have added a video of the wick burning to show the aspect of temporary.