The Corpus Series of Paintings by Linda Sgoluppi

Narrated video showing the Corpus Series of paintings, with detail. The paintings are rooted in an image seen in a photograph taken by a New York Firefighter after the destruction of the World Trade Center. The photo showed deep mounds of rubble and twisted girders, amongst this landscape of destruction were areas marked out by a roughly painted message 'Body Part'. Of all the images of the disaster it was the one that struck me the most. Even so I'd had no intention of making paintings about the disaster not least that it was too recent, raw and terrible.
Later on, thinking about the photo, it occurred to me that it had a quality of quietness about it, an aftermath, when time seemed to hang suspended. I started to think of the disaster as being a legitimate one for the studio. There is a Western Art tradition of Artists using terrible events as subject matter, Goya's figurative painting of the 'Execution of the Rebels of the 3rd May', and the more abstract 'Guernica' by Picasso are examples.
In preliminary research on the Web prior to painting, I looked up the words 'Body Part' and 'Corpus' in a search engine and was surprised to find that for 'Body Part' the search only returned results referring to car or auto parts it seemed ironic because the motor car has always been such an American icon and now a new image, the Twin Towers destruction, was a terrible icon to replace it.
I used decorator's rollers to apply the bright colours. Marks made on the canvas were reminiscent of tyre marks as well as of twisted metal. Three years after the collapse of the Towers and after I had finished the paintings I visited New York for the first time and saw 'Ground Zero'.

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