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, the diagram from Galen through Vesalius’s Fabrica (1543) to the present-day textbook. The other is the Romanian Orthodox tradition of writing icons on glass in the village of Nicula, in Transylvania. You do not paint an icon there. You write it — God cannot be drawn, only written. The tradition ended with my great-grandfather, Gheorghe Feur — Clopotarul (the Bellringer) — the last icon writer working in the village in 1972.

Medical seeing moves outside in — the body made legible by being opened. The icon moves inside out — the saint written, not depicted. In both, I witness what does not get revealed, and what crosses the line when it does. The body I return to is sacred and dissected, queer and held, resilient and fading — the posture of life inside the moment of decay.

Both inheritances are carried across mediums chosen by what the subject permits to be shown. Often the body is in water, as in a falling drop — the in between: water is what we are around, what we are made of, and what runs through us. The work catches light at the surface where one reading of the body ends and another begins — the skin against sky, the figure against ground, the icon against light.

Across the work, the same hinges recur — being born, falling in love, finding a passion, getting ill, passing on. The bodies that occupy them change. What gets carried through is the yoke — the inheritance — and underneath, as is life, a heartbeat. From beat to beat — the count the Bellringer kept, the count I keep.

— C Fodoreanu