RITUALIZED
Nakita Shelley
Ritualized explores the ritual and elemental symbols of Nakita Shelley’s interpreted experiences as a woman in Utah culture. Using crystal, water, soil, clay, cotton, and the body, Shelley combines installation and performance art as both a metaphorical and physical representation of what it means to be woman within this culture. Born and bred in Utah, Shelley gives context to the cognitive dissonance embedded in the gender and sexual expectations within herself. My Body is a Temple, A Mother’s Place, Natural Sisters, and In the Name of The engage Shelley’s critique and confrontation with these constructs between the viewer and herself.
A Mother’s Place is created from crystal dishes filled with crystallized salt water. Crystal dishes are a prominent heirloom in Shelley’s family culture as crystal dishes are cherished and passed on through the female line. The potent salt is taken from the Great Salt Lake, what the Western Goshute tribe called Pi’a-pa or Ti’tsa-pa: big water, bad water. This salt, unique to the Utah landscape, carries specific associations, both spiritual and temporal, as an element of preservation, an essential nutrient, and a neutralizer. The human body cannot live without salt.
When combined, the salt turns the dish into a vessel. Historically, culturally, legally, and religiously, women’s primary role has been vessel. A vessel by nature is something to be filled; a vessel by nature has a hollow, a womb, a lack. When linked to reproductive politics, philosophical treatise, religious doctrine, etc., this association is deeply problematic and troubling to Shelley. Within the LDS faith, the primary role of a woman is to be a mother, in this life or the next—it is central to God’s plan. Shelley reflects on this through the unique interaction between salt and crystal; it grabs and binds on to each other—salt overwhelms crystal—and culture consumes body.
There is an imperative cultural link made between the relationship of women and nature. Feminist and eco-feminist theorists have long discussed this link and its negative implications. When nature is feminized, when women are viewed as “closer” to nature, when nature is seen as something to subordinate, the consequences are devaluation.
“Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5: 13)
Natural Sisters, an installation of 12 white cotton modest dresses suspended in space, radiates a female embodiment of sisterhood. Shelley observes that a stereotypical understanding of “female” grew from her own experience where cultural acceptance of femininity was displayed through dress. These 12 cotton dresses begin to unravel the disconnect between what is sacred and what is sexualized. Each dress is marked with a soil imprint of a consenting female body from Shelley’s own community. The soil is harvested from two local granaries that were once Relief Society granaries: storehouses of one the largest women’s organizations in the world. While soiled smudges on pure white cloth remains a symbol of the presumed “impure female,” Shelley calls to the empowering women in her community, all with their own unique association to the Relief Society, to exploit the potential of the organization to harness its power of nurturing a sisterhood through candor of the body.
In the Name of The visualizes images of Shelley clothed in white and partially submerged in water. The display corresponds with an LDS baptismal font and the religious associations of rebirth, sacrament, and baptism. Shelley’s displacement of the natural body, seeping through her wet cotton dress, gives way to the subtle act of pushing back on the patriarchal system that would have submerged her. This speaks to the “true” deprivation of women’s sexuality represented in a patriarchal culture supported by historical views of nature (Susan Griffin).
In the performance associated with Ritualized, Shelley ceaselessly and thoroughly rubs clay onto her body—clay from the Salt Lake Temple stone quarry—focusing on the places classified as “most sacred” on women’s bodies. Shelley’s body is a consenting platform for the thesis that the female body is not inherently a sexualized object. The idea that “my body is my temple” remains in the clay left behind at the conclusion of Shelley’s performance; the internalized ritual is paired within her. Clay or dirt is biblically associated with male creationism and healing: Adam in Genesis, and later when Jesus Christ heals the blind man. When paired with the female body, Shelley suggests that clay both heals the body, and at the same time, represents dirtiness and impurity. Shelley is consumed momentarily by this ritual that inevitably comes to an end as nature allows the clay to dry and crack off in response to her breath and continuous movement. Any clay that does not flake off Shelley’s body is a personal remnant, as is her internalized attitudes of impurity and immodesty.
Whether women’s bodies are born/derived as a vessel, object, force, standard, or temple, Shelley believes they are worthy of and deserve godliness. This installation is both the culmination of an ignored expression of a woman’s “derived” gender and sexuality muted by her community and the public forum to unite and unify women and their bodies.
Ritualized Copyright 2024