Topos Embodied: Beauty Constructs and Female Landscape

The unique geological structure of Parian marble allowed ancient sculptors to shape the most sensuous of human forms.

In this exhibition, recent mothers Justyna Borucka and Cat Vitebsky respond to MOCA's cast collection via a return to the original marble quarry on Paros, the source of the marble from which so many ancient Greek masterpieces were sculpted. Theirs is a return, also, to the human figure through the idea of topos (in Greek, τόπος), exploring layers of time and transformation in myth, in the material of the marble itself, and in the worldview of the people of Paros today.

Together, they interrogate the varied implications of the hardness of rock and the soft curves of the idealised body in classical sculpture, by exploring parallels between the marks of the quarrying process on the body of the earth and the scars on the landscape of their own post-partum bodies – and, through the prism of bodily archetypes and the challenges of womanhood, question the canons of beauty inherited from classical origins.

View of Justyna Borucka's workshop on Paros. Copyright: the artist.