Noriko Nakamura

Noriko Nakamura Liang Luscombe

on Abjection , Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 1. Deborah Caslav Covino, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture , State University of New York Press, Albany, 2004, p. 21.

2. Have you ever glimpsed parts of your own body whilst in the middle of some particularly enthusiastic and exhilarating sex? When in the briefest moment your limbs and torsos are twisted and compressed in ways that are hard to imagine form your own body. This could not possibly be me; I can’t do that, you think for a split second. Cut to Noriko Nakamura’s latest installation Womb Realm (2022), in which compressed nipples protrude from the layers of rope that press firmly against the upper chest and abdomen revealing two plump breasts. The smooth, rounded form of a buttocks emerges from the textured surface of the sedimentary rock formation, sitting on a bed of rope. Further ropes—or perhaps human strands of hair—burst forth and weave their way out from the womb-like cavity of a rock basin. Across Noriko Nakamura’s series of sculptures, the maternal body bubbles up and emerges, fragmented, and constrained by rope and then recedes, melting into the limestone forms from which they are carved.

Through the lens of abjection, Nakamura draws on a web of personal experiences in which the body’s sensory perception of the self becomes flooded and upended during acts of sex, childbirth, and Kinbaku (a form of Japanese BDSM). As feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva writes, ‘The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.’1 Here, the boundaries of selfhood and the physical body become ambiguous, in the excess, and in violation of its own borders. Nakamura’s installation is made up of three discrete sculptures in which one could hardly say that the works themselves evade the definable edges of objecthood. Instead, Nakamura attempts to translate the experience of sensory overload in which pleasure and pain become increasingly intermingled into spatial bodily fragmentation within each sculpture itself. The central and most dynamic sculpture, the internal space of the womb becomes external, bursting forth, potent and then calcified in stone. In this work, Nakamura gestures toward Kristeva’s central proposition, that abjection in a Western paradigm is resolutely maligned to the domain of the maternal, as both the object of waste and due to her menstrual blood and her child’s dependence upon her, a site and source of abject life.2 Nakamura plays with the concept of the mother’s womb as an entity considered a threat by the patriarchal order in order to discuss the complex way the figure of the mother becomes quite literally a site of splintered and contested meaning.

In Womb Realm, Nakamura entangles the maternal with masochism, attempting to understand her maternal experience through the erotic framework of BDSM. Ropes pull and press upon the sculpted body, as Nakamura asks how domination becomes a way to break down distinctions of self and the Other to discover an expanded sense of subjectivity through a desire for self-annihilation. Could motherhood be the ultimate experience of self-annihilation and pain as pleasure through an interdependence formed between mother and child? The work recalls a proposition by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, that the action of masochism highlights to us the impossibility of denying subjectivity because ‘in order to cause myself to be fascinated by my self-as-object, I should necessarily have to be able to realize the intuitive apprehension of this object such as it is for the Other, a thing which is on principle impossible.’ It is this very impossibility that Nakamura utilises as her primary sculptural material, in which as the subject and sculptor, attempts to reassert her objectivity, that she only further is engorged and even beset with her own ever-present subjecthood.