La Veuve (The Widow)

Katrine Helmersson was known for her extensive knowledge about ethnographic cult objects, used in the rituals of far-away countries. Many of her works are also inspired by different fetishes and idols from overseas cultures. Her art thus often borrows its universal, ambiguous and sensual shapes not only from her own imagination, but also from non-European cultures. In the process Helmersson, with incredible accuracy, manages to address topics and subjects like lust, wild longing, oppression and retribution in a form that transcends both time and space. The works commonly associate to original forms or religious artefacts from indigenous peoples.

Helmersson’s travels, including trips to Mali and stays with the Dogon-people, have served as inspiration. The artist succeeds in infusing shapes and materials with potent yet undefined emotional content, where the physical shapes communicate what we know but cannot verbalize. Annika Öhrner writes (in Amulets Against the Evil Eye, exhibition catalogue, Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum, Stockholm, 2014):

She has travelled several times to Mali since 2006, each time becoming more deeply involved in the country’s traditional sculpture, architecture and contemporary art. An important pathfinder was Louise Bourgeois, the French-American sculptor whose work has been significant for Helmersson. She met Bourgeois personally at one of her salons in Manhattan the year before the first Mali trip, and realized then how meaningful the animist, African culture was for Bourgeois. Through her son, Jean-Louis Bourgeois, who lives in Mali and is a connoisseur of traditional mud-brick architecture there, new doors were opened. 

Peter Cornell (born 1942, former professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, author and art critic) has also written (in ‘Katrine Helmersson’s Poetics: Reverie and Automatism, Myth and Bodily Subconscious’) about the impact the art of Mali had on Helmersson:

While travelling in Mali, Katrine Helmersson was deeply impressed by the domestic items and clay architecture of the Dogon people. Art and ethnography meet in her work just as they once did for Michel Leiris who on his journey from Dakar to Djibouti was profoundly struck by the artefacts that he encountered in Mali. Leiris belonged to the circle of ethnographers and surrealists centred on Georges Bataille’s periodical Documents, a fortunate constellation – as was the marriage between the artist Louise Bourgeois and ethnologist Robert Goldwater. A vein of this ethnographical surrealism underlines Katrine Helmersson’s poetics: reverie and automatism, myth and bodily subconscious.

The inspiration behind La Veuve, however, predates and precedes Helmersson’s exploration of African art. Annika Öhrner, for example, writes (in Amulets Against the Evil Eye), that it probably can be traced all the way back to the days as an art student in India (at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Vadodara, Gujarat, India in 1988):

A fundamental question that arose in this situation was the following: what forms can one forge with one’s hands? Through the imprint of hands and fingers in clay, objects are created that are later cast in bronze and form a series of small, highly varied and expressive objects. Ever since, her work has been rooted in this primary formative experience. Helmersson then began a long series of sculptures and deeply personal works, which include sculptures charged with materially ambivalent expressions, like the early work La Veuve (1992), a series of phallic-like objects in patinated plaster with traces of the artist’s bite, hanging on iron hooks from the wall.

In connection with Helmersson’s mid-career retrospective Pochoir at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm (15 November 2014 – 1 February 2015), Curator Ulrika Sten looked towards the Mediterranean rather than the Indian Ocean when tracing the inspiration behind La Veuve back to the ancient Etruscan civilization (900 BC – 27 BC):

Katrine Helmersson’s art is both sensual and symbolic, with frequent references to the body, and physical imprints of the artist herself. In the early piece La Veuve/The Widow (1992), for instance, the artist’s bite marks are visible on the phallus-like objects. The inspiration came from Etruscan phallus amulets. Katrine Helmersson studies cult objects from different parts of the world, and the sources of several of her works can be traced back to religious artefacts and fetishes.

Art history is abundantly rich in phallic imagery. There’s not too much mystery about the fact that human beings are obsessed with reproduction and sexuality: it’s rather essential for our existence, after all. Paulina Sokolow has discussed this, in connection with La Veuve (in Herman Bergman. ‘1100 Degrees’, exhibition catalogue, CFHILL, Stockholm, 3 December 2021 – 7 January 2022):

However, the balancing act between hidden, formal symbology and immediate depictions of genitalia can be a controversial one. While the former might pass as a triumph obelisk, or an imposing pillar, the latter might well cause offence. Katrine Helmersson’s La Veuve has become a classic since it was first shown in the early 1990s. Particularly, perhaps, when it was used as the cover image for author and literature professor Ebba Witt-Brattström’s pioneering work Ur könets mörker [Out of the Depths of Gender] (1993), which is considered an essential contribution to modern feminist thought in Sweden today. Veuve is French, and means “widow”, i.e., a woman who has lost her partner. The sculpture is just as ambiguous as the concept. An oblong, suspended, irregular, fleshy “pendulum”, which has been worked by both fingers and mouth. The mouth is soft, just like a woman’s genitals, but it is also toothed. It is the source of the imprints we see on La Veuve, both in the form of gentle nibbles and more violent bites, like where the tip has been bitten off. Is this a case of vengeance, self-defence, or aggression? Or, simply, a mere morsel of hunger and lust? Feminist discourse has evolved quite a lot since the 90s, partly thanks to the broadening of the definition of sexual minorities. But back then, thirty years ago, the issue at hand was whether female lust and visibility demanded space and a new language.

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Herman Bergman. ‘1100 Degrees’,

3 December 2021 – 7 January 2022.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Literature

Ebba Witt-Brattström, Ur könets mörker Etc. Litteraturanalyser 1993 – 2003, 2003, La Veuve on the cover.

(Eds.) Åsa Cavalli-Björkman & Petra Gröminger, Amulets Against the Evil Eye, exhibition catalogue, Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum, Stockholm, 2014, compare other cast, illustrated full page in colour, p. 9.

(Ed.) Helena Scragg, Katrine Helmersson och/and Abdoulaye Konaté, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Art Museum, 2015, La Veuve mentioned, p. 35 (in article ‘Body and Cosmos. Peter Cornell about Katrine Helmersson’).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation