Armature

The container of human life is a complex experience unable to be reduced to a single label.  It is full of chaos and harming coexisting with ugliness and beauty. In Ursala Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag of Theory Fiction, she criticizes society’s obsession with the hero conquering the “weakness” of the world through violence and an unending thirst for blood.  She explains this reduction of the world to a black-and-white narrative writing…

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process”1. 

Stories are not confined between the beginning and the end or the climax and resolution but rather offer a glimpse into a continuous cycle of human experience. Heroes do not need to be placed on a pedestal above everyone else but are a single part of this bag containing the stories of humanity. 

In my armature, I sought to reflect on this inability to divide the world between hero and villain or chaos and harmony. The two figures are posed in aggressive stances as if they are fighting each other but are connected in their form. Neither is raised on a pedestal above the other but is contained in this form fluidly connected to the ground showing the interconnectedness of us all. I chose the form of birds after reading an article about increased rates of cannibalism amongst bird species, specifically eagles due to the chaotic impacts of climate change. Connecting to this carrier bag containing us all, eagles are not discriminating between species in their pursuit of survival but are turning on their own.  The birds are in a continuous flow of conflict and harmony neither rising victoriously as the hero. 

 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), 7.