“ I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. ”
[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.
~ Olivia Laing
Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.
That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.
Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?
