Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
Liberational and revolutionary politics have always been a central tenet of surrealism. Through her own political activism she met members of the American Surrealist group Arsenal, founded in Chicago by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, at the first large anti-Vietnam war demonstration in New York in 1967. She also made connections to several surrealist groups in France. Her first collection of poetry and short fiction, From the Star Chamber (1974) was provoked by a chilling account of the torture of a pregnant leftist agitator just after the coup d’état in Greece. These and other stories were later republished in The Butcher’s Tales (1980). [12] Her commitment to revolutionary protest continues, particularly against the tortuous injustices of repressive regimes and the destruction of innocent cultures driven in the name of economic progress. [13] She has also published several volumes of poetry, of which she says “Poetry taught me to distill, to get to the heart of things quickly.” [14] In the early years she worked primarily as a visual artist, exhibiting her drawings and illustrations internationally since the early 1960s. [15] As her literary career has taken precedence, she still maintains a balance between art and writing, returning to her studio as often as possible.
The Transformation of Images
Like the surrealists Ducornet knows that Paris offers rewards to those who wander her streets in search of magic. [16] On one such adventure after moving to France in 1972, she discovered a small red book summarizing the magical lore of the mandrake (Atropa Mandragora) by Gustave Le Rouge. [17] Mandrakes appear in her novels, mostly in connection with the casting of magical spells. Even in the most mundane illustration, the mandrake’s uncanny resemblance to a human being is striking. It is a strange plant indeed, bordering on some sort of pre-human existence, as Adam himself was composed of the earth’s mud. Broad leaves spring directly from the roots which bifurcate into leg-like forms. Mentioned in classical times as an ingredient in sleep-inducing potions, medicines and aphrodisiac philters, mandrakes played an important role during the Middle Ages in magical operations. The illustration from Le Rouge shows the plant’s broad leaves with small whitish flowers and fruit, shaped like miniature apples or large peppercorns. Magnified versions of the berry’s contour and a cross-section float below on either side of the plant.
Such illustrations, gleaned from natural history books and encyclopedias, often serve as inspiration for Ducornet’s drawings. The metamorphosis of Le Rouge’s wood engraving is evident in her lithograph, Mandragore Magique, 1983, particularly with the smaller mandrake on the right. The plant’s tiny flowers have been transformed into small vaginal ellipses, while the mandrake’s legs are demurely tucked together. On the left, the maturing plant has metamorphosed into a voluptuous female, with the globed breasts of an Indian goddess and an hourglass waist cinched by a leafy corset. Both mandrakes are female, one adolescent the other mature; their gracefully swaying roots lending a sense of flight, or at least mobility. Neither has a head—leaves suffice, but their veins assume a human animation, pulsing with life’s blood. Small organic forms cluster below, carefully tied packets of roots, spidery leaves or perhaps serpents, along with vaginal seed pods, and two obedient sperm straightened and stilled for our inspection. Unlike the marginalia in most botanical illustrations, their relationship to the larger plants is unclear, but they augment the magical presence of the two sister mandrakes and emphasize the Venusean sexuality of the image.
Her images are often organized as if they were encyclopedic plates, systematically positioned and yet illustrating objects of the most inexplicable and delightfully imaginative forms, as in her Sacred Toys of Tlön. [18] Her process is largely automatic, starting with a line or a small detail and then letting the intuitive process guide her hand. The top row here began with some automatic variations on a feather. The vaginal unfolding of three large forms in the middle suggests exotic flowers, seed pods, crustacean embryos, or mineral deposits containing the fossils of butterflies. Below is a dancing geological strata that erupts into pods and seeds, compressing and extending in a ritual of fermentation and cell reproduction. The usual taxonomic order imposed on nature dissolves here to form a dynamic and migrating correspondence between the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds. In essays and recent novels, she examines the marvels and monsters of historic Kunstkammern, such as Peter the Great’s cabinet of wonders in St. Petersburg. [19] Her travels have taken her to many natural history museums and botanical and zoological gardens throughout the world, although she has expressed her mixed feelings about such collections as they often have abetted the destruction of nature while attempting to preserve it. [20]
The artistic process and its relationship to her writing are linked. She describes the point at which a drawing begins:
...I feel a very real affinity with the Zen artists who meditate upon nature and later paint from memory and imagination. I like to start with an image and slowly shift its place in time and space: put it to the light, under a glass, cut into it, stroke it, it gets hard, it gets hot, it weeps, it grows scales, and claws, it bleeds, it ejaculates, it gives birth, it takes root… And so it happens with words. [21]
