Tag: nudist

Katty Hoover – Untitled from Lake Como series (2014)

Places that hold meanings for people result in the construction of
unique ‘memory maps,’ yet many memories manifested in the landscape
leave little, if any, physical trace. A pile of water-worn cobbles on
the riverbank to mark the time and place when you first learnt to
swim–the autumn floods that year would have removed those. The tree bark
or bus shelter where we inscribed the initials of our first love–the
tree’s new growth will have erased most traces, and bus shelters are
repainted or replaced. A first pet buried in a garden, or offerings put
into the ground to commemorate a family member’s death–most are unlikely
to survive the rigours of time. […] At Malin Head in Donegal, thousands
of beach pebbles spell people’s names, signing themselves on to the
landscape through a physical act. In many cases, the names within soon
become illegible, the pebbles displaced by the feet of subsequent
visitors, or re-used for new acts of commemoration. The ways in which
people choose to mark space and commit events to memory suggests that
similar, small-scale practices in the past may also have been transient
or overwritten, with the vast majority not visible in the archaeological
record at all.

–Adrian M. Chadwick & Catriona D. Gibson, from “‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ A Place through Memory, Myth, and Place,” Memory, Myth and Long-term Landscape Inhabitation, ed. Adrian M. Chadwick & Catriona D. Gibson (Oxbow Books, 2016)

Molly Walsh – Pubes (2016)

This little comic is excellent for a number of reasons.

It’s simple, cute and spends a lot of energy contextualizing the action in a fully formed world, i.e. the shower with a polka dot shower curtain, soap, shampoo, a razor–in other words the detritus you’d expect to see in any normal shower; the nude beach is palm trees, tropical fronds and flowers but also other people go about there lives pretty much normally (except for the fact that their nude in public).

Someone a great deal wiser than me once gave me the following advice: never tell where it is possible to show.

A lot of folks on Tumblr like to talk a lot about how radical they are. There are folks that argue that the normalcy of the patriarchal expectation for women to shave down there has rendered the natural state of post-pubescent women as undesirable. To combat this, some people go overboard supporting personal autonomy w/r/t body hair to a point that is–for all intents and purposes–fetishization.

This cleanly cuts through all that mess by showing a woman who clearly inhabits a world similar to the viewers own. The ‘politics’ of it don’t enter into her decision–it seems she’s just curious how it’ll look and finds it cute.

Subsequently, her friend expresses surprise in a joking fashion but is super accepting and supportive. (Instead of being like oh look at you, you rebel you!)

In other words, this isn’t focused on theory or praxis, it moves straight to simple application and in so doing it presents something that’s equally legible to folks who’ve spent half a lifetime immersed in critical theory to folks who just stopped in for a momentary distraction.