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Bringing together new and recent work by a group of international artists, Fruit bursts on your lips asks how we can experience domesticity while resisting its oppressive undertones, particularly in relation to femininity. It shows the home as a performative and psychic space, where kinship and the self are established and changed through affective forces: love, cruelty and indifference.

Fruit bursts on your lips
by Hana Janečková

In our house, we want the forest before the book, the abundance of leaves before the pages.  We want fruit to burst on our lips – the pulses before destiny. I want the naked, prenatal and anonymous night. We want the arrival to see arriving.

As soon as we draw, we advance into the unknown, hearts beating avidly, we are going to lose ourselves. Technique: time travel. In the bedroom, lines cross the holes of the body, songs cease.

In the kitchen, there are acts of births, potency and impotency swirl through canvases of the dinner table. Eyes are wide to follow the movement of the pencil. Bones, leaves and lettuce, artichokes and arugula, it precipitates itself in spasms and waves, the length of the arm passing the hand and pencil. The centre’s the entry to the forest of leaves. You recognise the true drawing, the live one: swirling, still running, it escapes from the plate. As long as we are seeking, we are not yet full; as long as we are seeking we are innocent. Circles and strokes to meet each other, apart and together. The drawing is without a stop.

Lines drawn by cherry stones. Cherry wood, tainted and polish soothing the body, encrusted with sooo real jewels grazing on the speckles of dust. On the floor they advance, tracing the steps, collecting the bodily parts as they roll. They crack and roll, always splitting. How to draw speed, how to draw hesitation? Drawing spots – polka dots advance such a rhythm – drama without a stage, an instant relief from the footprints.

Does desire die quicker when lines settle or when the body is close to fullness and saturation?

The drawing carries sounds and noises – the shuffling of chairs when the artist’s voice meets other. When they meet, long streams of thread to gain a body, it blossoms. Suspended, it bears revelation and sadness, yarn, story and song of polyphonic rebirths. Between us and the strings and scores, threads lay bare, untangled: how to give a form to emotion? What is being felt and thought through the body to the stringy bits licking a wall? The voice, as if suspended from the ceiling, rests, yet it fills the space with sunlight. The moments we seek to draw are when the yarns blossom, untangling the time. You’ll recognise the true drawing as the live one: it’s still running.

An afterthought: the figure which announces itself is an angel-witch. It’s from inside of the day that the drawing rises to the light. With Lou, we’ve just drawn an angel, screeching and singing, as her heart rises to the sun. Where do we appear now?

Technique: Time travel. Taste the world, I taste ten worlds, they burst like fruit, they burst on your lips.

(After Hélène Cixous, Stigmata)

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