Anju Kasturiraj (RCA) - 2023-24 Students
10030468@network.rca.ac.uk

Embryonic Crones: Ritual Dissection of Intergenerational Memory Held by Skin and Soil

I was raised to venerate soil as a living ancestor; the darkness of a burial and the embryo around a germinating seed. This is a site specific interrogation of how the earth beneath a colonising power and the diasporic bodies inhabiting it are in communion as they both hold memories of colonial violence. My practice involves sourcing clay-soil from toxic sites in London to build ritual earthenware, and performing subversions of traditional rituals as an exploration of how the body stores and generates collective memory.

I will approach my practice in response to Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection and her recurring subject of the maternal body. I will dissect how through their materiality and symbolism, the ritual objects of earthenware and milk signify politicised concepts of fertility, purity, ethnonationalism, and abjection. My research is primarily informed by postcolonial feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and object oriented ontology.

Primary supervisor: Rachel Garfield

Secondary supervisor: Dr Melanie Jackson