Statement

A pediatrician making icons of the body.

My practice draws on two traditions of looking at the body. One is the medical archive — the body as medicine sees it, opened and drawn, from Galen through Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) to the present-day textbook. The other is the Romanian Orthodox practice of writing icons on glass in the village of Nicula, in Transylvania, where you do not paint an icon but write it: the word of God can be transmitted, not invented. The last to write them in the village was my great-grandfather, Gheorghe Feur — Clopotarul, the Bellringer. I am the first to write them after him, four generations and an ocean on; the work is how the line continues.

Medical seeing moves from the outside in: the body made legible by being opened. The icon moves from the inside out: the saint written onto the surface, never breached to be known. I work in the seam between them — witnessing what a body does not reveal, and what crosses the line when it is made to. The body I return to is sacred and dissected at once, queer and held, resilient and fading: the posture of a life inside the moment of its decay.

Each piece is made in whatever medium the subject will permit. Often the body is in water — a figure in a falling drop, in the in-between, since water is what we are around, what we are made of, and what runs through us. The work catches the light at the surface, where one reading of the body ends and another begins: skin against sky, figure against ground, icon against light.

The same passages keep returning in the work — being born, falling in love, falling ill, passing on, and the finding, somewhere across all of it, of a calling. The bodies that move through them are never the same, and each arrives certain its passage is the first ever made. What carries through is the inheritance, the yoke; and under it, as under any living body, a heartbeat. From beat to beat — the count the Bellringer kept, the count I keep.

— C Fodoreanu