Spine Songs Irene June

Irene June’s Spine Songs is a SITE-SPECIFIC body that works to access ancestral spine.

The human spine is a site of structure, simultaneously immovable and flexible. It is core to the body and supplier of the sympathetic nervous system. It stimulates fight or flight response, (the spine is a carrier of trauma response). A physical protector of the self, it is a site for assertion and unwavering self worship. Ancestral spine is the nerve/ audacity/ bravery/ commitment to exist fully.

The spine is our axis between heaven and earth. A mentor once spoke about the silver thread that followed the spine, stretching into the sky through the crown of the head, and descending through the sacrum into the core of the earth. The thread stretches upwards indefinitely through space. The spine connects us to heaven.

Spine Songs is about finding the spine, as a way of solidifying a personal sense of identity through transness and Taiwanese heritage. The work begins with ancestral self-worship as the foundation for every next step. Spiritual connection to Taiwanese ancestry and culture informs June’s transgenderhood and vice versa, and the work builds a space that allows for the enormity of self in its multiplicities. Through the spine we have access to our inherent divinity, as our spine gives us inherent connection to heaven. Transness is the body remembering itself. Through the lens of the spine, we can further access the depths and inherent godliness within transgender identity. The spine weaponizes and protects, teaching us how to assert selfhood.

Irene June Artist Statement

Within the work, there is an inherent underpinning of reverence and veneration. June’s personal relationship with ancestral prayer and the link between the living and the dead has greatly influenced their sculptural practice. This is evident through the use of funerary papers and incense, joss paper, and embalming processes using wax. The sculptural work is birthed mainly from grieving and mourning and acts as a physical exploration of what generational healing can look like, feel like, and mean.

June’s practice’s physical manifestations are related directly to their upbringing in that they have taken everything they learned in the kitchen to the studio. Their parents and grandparents taught them about spiritual survival in a diasporic context through their meals. Their practice recognizes the power in Chinese cooking as a way to revisit and celebrate an ancestral home. He engages with materials through many cooking processes—folding, mashing, boiling, melting, heating, molding, drying, soaking, and arranging. Just as his grandmother prepares a meal for their family, they approach their work with the same curative intentions, namely to share a sense of revitalization.

The sculptural forms are influenced by mountains and caves, the interior and exterior human landscape, and the fluidity of smoke in the air. They are inspired by the visual similarities shared between geologic bodies and human bodies, such as the cracking of rock, drying of skin, and the rising of smoke - a visual passage between the living and spirit worlds. Materials range from melted wax, turmeric, rice, joss paper, dyed water, found plastic vessels, and welded steel. Physically, the work oscillates between chaotic and organized visual languages: old age and new growth, found and formed, edible and inedible. The forms prioritize a spectrum of feelings, textures, and colors that coexist within one ambiguous environmental body. Using sculpture, Irene June is inviting the audience to engage in a personal narrative of diasporic reconciliation and healing.

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