Giulia Vardabasso-Lei

As humans, we like to think of ourselves as being ruled by logic and higher functions – as somehow separate from the bodies which tether us to our most base and carnal instincts. At the same time, however, the interconnectedness of the digestive and nervous systems has been familiar to scientific and popular understanding since as early as the eighteenth century. Known today as the gut-brain axis, this is clearly evidenced by common turns of phrase such as „gut feeling,“ „gut-wrenching,“ or „to go with one’s gut.“ In an age largely defined by philosophical dualism, this concept may seem dubious to many – how can two seemingly unrelated organs communicate? How can one’s emotions possibly affect one’s body? However, it is not just a matter of simple equivalence.

The gut-brain dialectic becomes visually explicit in Isabella Fürnkäs’ series of ink drawings entitled Untitled (Laundry). True to the nomenclature, in past installations these works have been hung on fine red string by paperclips, traversing the exhibition space in rows – like linen sheets hung out to dry. In fact, the title can also bring to mind the idiom „airing out one’s dirty laundry“: to make one’s problems known – to spill one’s guts. Indeed, here we face a serialised spilling of guts. Over and over, ink drips from the broad watery brushstrokes off the page. We can almost imagine black puddles of ink pooling on the pristine white floor. Twisting and winding coils are rendered darkly with thick brushstrokes. These organs are ambiguous – it is unclear whether we are faced with roiling intestines or brains. But does it really make a difference? The inner tumult remains the same. 

Pertaining to the same series of ink drawings and often exhibited together are The Unconscious Soul, three portraits which set themselves apart from the rows and rows of organs. However, the manner in which they are rendered – wrinkled and gnarled and twisted – recall the organic ambiguity of the other drawings. Faces become brains become guts. Thought, feeling, and (un)conscious become indistinguishable in a game of resemblance.

If, in the emotional hierarchy of bodily organs, love is attributed to the heart and reason to the brain, the gut surely embodies our darkest, innermost feelings and instinctual drives. This interconnectedness with the brain – the seat of the ego, of reason – therefore becomes an uncomfortable link. The division between thought and feeling is much less than we could possibly ever think.

In her Gravity and Grace, the great twentieth century French mystic Simone Weil writes: Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.[1] If, according to Weil, the tendency of the human soul and of all that is natural is towards expansion – to spread, to englobe, to devour – it takes supernatural force to abstain from this tendency. Abstinence creates a void where there was once an unrelenting desire to consume. The void, in turn, makes way for grace. The presence of grace is therefore contingent on the existence of the void to contain it. Grace is the ultimate form of abstinence. 

In a modern world characterised by techno-capitalistic nihilism, where fewer and fewer people experience spirituality as tied to a specific place (if at all), the modern bed has come to occupy a role as a veritable sacred space – replacing the shrine, the temple, the church, as a site for ritual and worship. It is simultaneously an altar for our most intimate moments – both with others and with ourselves – as well as a confessional bearing witness to our secret hopes, desires, fears, failures.

Isabella Fürnkäs (b. 1988, Tokyo) captures this multilayered meaning in the aptly titled My Bed. In her series of about ten mixed-media drawings, Fürnkäs portrays beds in various stages of disarray. Delicately rendered pencil outlines of disheveled sheets and pillows akimbo are sometimes lovingly and precisely blocked in with pale washes of colour, other times violently obscured by thick black masses of paint, settling over the pale pastel comforters like pervasive dark thoughts which cling to us without the day’s distractions. Fürnkäs’ beds are a reflection of our own complex (and often messy) inner lives: they are the place where we dream and daydream, where we embrace the ones we cherish most after a long day – but also where we bring strangers and bad thoughts, where we encounter the deepest unknown of our unconscious through nightmares and anxieties. 

The title itself is a tongue-in-cheek reference to British conceptual artist Tracey Emin’s homologously named, (in)famous installation My Bed (1998), in which she exhibited her own dishevelled bed on the floor of the Tate Gallery – knickers, stains, condoms, and all. Like Emin’s work, Fürnkäs’ beds are always empty. However, where the story of the former’s installation becomes explicit by virtue of its medium, Fürnkäs’ drawings work on a more subtle level. Intimacy, vulnerability, and anxiety are sensitively alluded to through brushstrokes of varying colours and intensities, leaving the viewer to imagine what exactly has transpired. Were the rumpled bed sheets the result of a restless night spent tossing and turning? Or a passionate evening? Or even perhaps an afternoon spent scrolling listlessly on social media? In any case, the bed is portrayed in all its messy duality – dreams and nightmares, love and hate, lust and longing, insomnia and slumber.