Feeling exposed

Roaming around the V&A, as you do, I was stunned and startled by what seemed to be, a quite gothic apocalyptic tower of dead bodies. Rachel Kneebone's complex porcelain sculptures unravels human experience, inspired by themes of transformation and renewal. Diversely the accumulation of bodies expresses movement and fluidity in a medium that is typically associated with an object or a 'thing' that is calm and passive. This then enabled Kneebone to explore the properties of porcelain, deliberately deteriorating her work so that the decayed aesthetic manifests the relationship between strength and vulnerability.

The tower is gridded with windows, each containing a different scenario, a different composition of bodies that are intertwined with each other in all kinds of disturbing contorted positions. Whilst scanning the sculpture from the base to the top I had a little thought, what if the Tower of Pisa was a façade? Who knows that maybe the Tower of Pisa's exterior is just a visceral skin that when you peel it back it reveals a chamber of bodies arranged like this?

There were lots and lots of body parts in the nude, some upside down, and some protruding limbs  reaching out to anybody that walked by. The structure had an obscure depth where the layers and layers of bodies were piled in one mass, each figure falling onto the next that displays a calamity, which heightens the vulnerability. Vulnerability is also defined through the fact that the bodies are in the nude, suspended and dumped, objectified like ragdolls, neglected and left to decay. Yet the complexity of the positions in the way that they have been 'frozen in time', portrays the human form in a supernatural manner as the arrangement is perceived as uncomfortable and abnormal.

Despite the morbid connotations of the ill-washout out flesh hue of the porcelain 'dead bodies', the sculpture doesn't manifest the body forms as people or characters or living human beings, that is the reason why viewers shouldn't feel any abject towards this magnificent column. I feel the figures in the sculpture are simply models demonstrating the silhouetted shape of the body, delivering movement through time in a sequence or a routine.