Text on Elsa

by Helen DeWitt
(Written for Kate Palmer's and Ingrid Kerma's exhibition The Irresistible Force October 2006 in response to Kerma's sculpture of her 92-year-old mother, Elsa)

i love that work. your mother does
these extraordinary things with her body, there is this flesh that is
completely outside the commodification of bodies that we live with, and
then there are the things she sews together for her body -- so there is
something very powerful about this work, something that is hard to
capture in words, about the way the medium produces shells of that body
in a substance that is, of course, so radically different from flesh,
and the work you had to go through to get it, persuading the possessor,
the inhabitant of this flesh to permit the flesh to have a cast on this
or that portion of the solid, to submit to the discomfort, and the final
piece, its fragmentation, its assemblage from parts, is itself a
manifestation of what it is to inhabit the flesh, to have casts put on
the flesh. i like this. it's exactly the opposite of what Lucien Freud
does, where he subjects people to intolerable expanses of boredom, of
discomfort, and the discomfort of the sitter is not permitted to affect
the painting, to be seen in the painting.