“Your lipstick left a bruise..” Your lipstick left a bruise on my wrist. I tried to wipe it away, but my pulse is still thumping. The honey on your tongue left me sticky. Sweating sugar from my pores. My heart..
“Your pulsing giant heart..” Your pulsing giant heart bringing you to your knees. Praying while you pull it out. Shove it into the earth and let it be home. May flowers grow where the emptiness lives.
“Carry the song..” Carry the song of my breath to your chest. And you will call me back. And like this we will find one another. No matter how lost we may be. I won’t give up.
This cup is one of 48 that make up the installation, “Fragments of Our Love Story.” These cups feature feminine forms that recall the Venus of Willendorf and other historical fertility objects. The carvings include many of my own writings and flow from one cup to another. Just as we hold each other’s stories in pieces and parts, the cups now exist throughout time and space, with many collectors. No two have the same words, making each unique in body, color, and content.
Your Lipstick Left a Bruise, Your Pulsing Giant Heart, Carry the Song, Triptych
Your Lipstick Left a Bruise, Your Pulsing Giant Heart, Carry the Song, 2019 Triptych
Porcelain cup with sgraffito detailing
Dimensions:
Overall size: 5 H x 9 W x 3 D in.
Individual size: 5 H x 3 W x 3 D in.
Unique
Alex Hodge was always drawn to the arts and regularly channeled her creativity as a child whether in watercolor classes or scrapbooking with her mother. Hodge focuses on prioritizing women’s narratives in all aspects of her work. Through the decorative and symbolic details, she hints at narratives without completing them to invite the viewer to participate in creating meaning. The women she invents exist in the present but is of the imagined future in which we all have room to flourish, to tell our stories, to give and receive love, and to express the beauty and pain of the human condition. Fundamentally, her artworks are a celebration of the tenacity and vulnerability of women and clay, an interplay of history and hope.
