Fiona Pardington: The Sex of Metals I and II

This is one of my earlier works that I am most pleased with, for a number of different reasons. The most important thing I think for me now looking back now will be the colours that you can see in the photographs, the toning in both these images ones more pink, ones more gold. I was using gold toner and you need to use another type of toner before that to prepare for the gold to sit in on top of. 

So these works are kind of simple because they are a visual play on a weather vane that’s broken in two, and its broken into the cock and the arrow so I’ve done what you would expect with the cock and put a man with it and a woman is holding the arrow, the broken part of the arrow facing up towards her head and the fletches over her mons pubis. Behind her you can see ginger flowers just about to sprout or bloom and there’s just the big flat leaves behind the male and he’s twisted around so you can see that he’s got a very large chest and he’s very hairy.

In fact these are very good friends of mine, people that I still know today, who I favoured back then as photography subjects. Warren, the guy, even went as far as to condition all the hair on his chest and stomach so it was nice and shiny for me.  I really appreciate little gestures like that and when I think of the photograph I tend to think about that with a smile.

I think that you can see that I’ve continued that simple male, female gender roles by choosing an old frame with logs on it around the side, a kind of funky, unusual kind of cheesy, but at the same time quite beautiful but extremely hard to get these days, I have to say.

Where-as the woman, Tertia, has very elegant beautiful flowers and leaves and ribbons wrapped around her frame and then there is occult imagery around the sides which is something that I have been interested in all my life, ever since I was very young and it talks about the sex of metals and I think what interested me about this, apart from the fact that everything is gendered in the occult you know planets etc. they all have their genders and their issues and their own kind of characters they are all anthropomorphised. So that was important to me and I was just looking kind of cheekily at that kind of thing and trying to make the work look complex because I wanted people to think very much about how gender and how those king of generalisations about sex and sexuality had permeated right through almost all of our consciousness and thinking even into the occult and astronomy and absolutely everything. 

这是我比较早的，而又非常满意的作品之一。我喜欢这件作品最重要的原因是构成这幅作品的两幅照片的颜色。这两幅照片中的颜色其实多于你可以看见的。它们的底色一个接近粉色，一个接近金色。我用的是金色的底色，你需要在使用金色的底色之前，运用另一种颜色来让金色吸附于上。

这件作品其实挺简单的。两幅照片是对一只破损成两半的风向标所作的艺术尝试。风向标破损的两部分，一部分是公鸡，一部分是箭头。我让一位男性手持公鸡，让一位女性手持箭头，箭头的尖端指向她的头部，尾部靠近她的下体。在她的身后你可以看到含苞待放的生姜花。而在男子身后，则有着大片的叶子，他的躯干弯转过来，你可以看到他宽阔的胸膛和浓密的毛发。

事实上，照片里的两人都是我很好的朋友，直到现在我们还保持着联系。在此之上，对我来说，他们也曾经是我非常钟爱的模特。沃伦，那位男性，甚至在拍摄之前护理了他胸前和腹部的毛发，所以在照片中它们看上去非常光亮。我喜爱这些贴心的小举措，以至于每当我看到这张照片时都难免会心一笑。

你可以看出我在这件作品中强调了男女的性别区分，我运用了粗犷的原木制成的相框环绕了这幅主角是男性的作品。这种材料的选取有些酷，有些调皮，但又同时十分切合主题。而且这种相框只属于过去，现在的人很难获得这种相框了。

至于照片中的女性，特西娅，则有着高雅美丽的花朵、树叶，以及缎带装点着她的相框。在相框的周围还描绘着拥有神秘主义色彩的图案。我记得我在小的时候听过一种说法，不同种类的金属有着男女之分。这使我感到非常有兴趣。因为人类把一切都赋予了性别。比如说星球。在英文中，每一颗星球都被赋予了特定的性别和个性，它们被完全的拟人化了。我认为这一点很有意思，所以我就制作了这件作品，让人们意识到性别和性已经深入到了人类意识的各个角落。包括神秘主义和天文学。

这就是为什么我会创作这件不加掩饰的作品。公鸡和箭头分开了，它们能够重新被拼接回去么？我不清楚。