Rocketgirl: VESSELS Opens the Body Like a Cabinet
In VESSELS, Rocketgirl paints figures in the language of the old masters, eyes closed, their bodies opening onto the worlds we carry now: a knight on a drip, a birdcage full of Bosch's creatures, an office war. 1/1s on SuperRare and editions on Transient Labs.
"Every figure in VESSELS has her eyes closed," Rocketgirl writes. "That's the first thing I want you to notice, because it's the whole point." The Scottish painter and digital artist, who describes her practice as a World of Obscured Oculi, published the essay for her new series on October 28. VESSELS is a set of 1/1s on SuperRare and editions on Transient Labs, on Ethereum, and its figures are painted "in the language of the past, classical oil and old master light," each one opening onto "a world that belongs to now or next."
The idea comes from a long line of bodies that open. Rocketgirl points to the medieval Vierge ouvrante, a wooden Virgin that swings open like a cabinet to reveal painted worlds; the Anatomical Venus, the wax women of 18th century Florence whose torsos lift away; Dalí's 1936 Venus de Milo with drawers; and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, grey and silent until the triptych is opened. "I kept returning to that gesture: the opening," she writes. "The moment the outside gives way and you see what someone is really carrying."
What they carry is the present. In ROYAL FLUSH a queen in white is kept alive by an IV bag marked GAMBLE. KNIGHTCORE lays a knight in a field of daisies and poppies, a neon city and a synthwave road inside his armour. ALICE IN WARLAND rides a carousel gryphon while toy soldiers swarm the platform and her skirt opens onto fire. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, after Whitman, is a veiled woman whose dress is a birdcage full of Bosch's creatures, and in MEN USED TO GO TO WAR a young knight's breastplate opens onto rows of office cubicles: "The battle didn't end, it moved indoors." 2 editions of 10 close the set: ARGUS WEPT, after the hundred eyed giant of Greek myth, and INCUBATIO, named for the Roman practice of sleeping in the Temple of Asclepius in hope of a healing dream, where small golden skeletons dance inside a sleeping woman's open ribcage.
Under it all, she writes, run 2 ideas: the multiverse, the parallel lives each of us holds, and hyperstition, "fictions that make themselves real by being believed in." None of her figures is screaming. They are calm while impossible worlds move inside them, which, she says, is "how it feels to be a person right now." Posting MEN USED TO GO TO WAR, she added that learning a new skill and evolving her work had been "the perfect antidote to a particularly dark period." VESSELS asks one question: "what are you carrying, and what will it become?"
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