Avium Aquae (Aquatic Bird)
2019
Gouache on paper
184 × 140 cm
Inga Meldere (1979) is a painter who lives and works in Helsinki. She earned a Bachelor’s in Pedagogy, specialising in Visual Art and Art History, from the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology of the University of Latvia (2001), and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Restoration of the Art Academy of Latvia. From 2013 to 2014, she studied at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. She currently studies in the master’s programme of the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
Maira Dobele (1976) is a writer and director who lives and works in Helsinki. She earned a BA in arts from the Latvian Academy of Culture. She studied documentary film at the film school ELO at Aalto University in Finland, graduating from its bachelor’s and master’s programmes.
Meldere and Dobele's collaboration began in 2013 in the Netherlands, where they produced the book The Great Disappointment (with painting reproductions by Meldere and text by Dobele, 2014). Later, at the invitation of artist and curator Kaspars Groševs, they made a work for the exhibition Kristāls, mode, sekunde (2018) – a language textbook cartoon about the similarities and differences between Finnish and Latvian.
The vulva is not the vagina. The vulva is the external female genitalia – the labia majora, the labia minora, the vulval vestibule and the clitoris – while the vagina is the sex organ that joins the uterus with the external genitalia. With age, a vagina may become narrower and shorter; meanwhile, it turns out that the clitoris – which, instead of being pea-sized, is actually the size of a budding peony – does not age! It fulfils its functions equally throughout life and is the only human organ meant only for pleasure.
Inga Meldere and Maira Dobele's game Avium Aquae (Aquatic Bird) invites viewers to remember or learn facts about the female body, sexuality and aging. They look at a person who was born as a woman – with female genitalia that define a woman biologically. The playfully poetic game of scientific facts gives the word to women. An important source of inspiration and reference for the artists’ work was The Hite Report, published in 1976 by the researcher of psychosexual behaviour Shere Hite, which remains the broadest empirically based study of sexuality.
meldere.com