Small but Mighty Wandering Pearl

Mandy Greer is a contemporary artist who specializes in using fibers and fabrics. Mandy Greer’s installation Small but Mighty Wandering Pearl from 2006 is a transcendentally beautiful work of art. Due to its gruesome imagery it is a contemporary example of the “vanitas” genre; following in the wake of contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith who also works in the “vanitas” genre.

The work is a gruesome scene of death. Atop a raised platform the work stands a great white stag. The stag has been disemboweled with its brilliant red entrails splattered across the platform, which is in striking contrast to the bleach white stag. Suspended above the platform on its far side hangs a grandiose chandelier coated with the organs of the stag.

The work is made with two different craft mediums; fabric and fiber. The stag is made from scraps of bleach white clothes of random size and shape stitched together to form the body, while the stag’s antlers are thoroughly coated in beads to give them a different texture from the rest of the body. The vibrant gore is made from yarn that has been crocheted into the shapes of various organs, the color of the yarn is not homogeneous, several different shades of red were used, which makes the work even more beautifully realistic. The chandelier seems to be an actual chandelier that has simply been covered in the worsted carnage.

The viscera is an example of ritualistic work. since it was made from red yarn that has been laboriously crocheted into the proper shapes. Mandy Greer could have done the gore quicker from a different material or made it with a different method, but she did not. she chose the slower less efficient method because of a conscious will which superseded practical function of the action. In that regard it is comparable to the work of Shahzia Sikander, in that Shahzia Sikander slowly and deliberately stains her paper with tea before she paints on it, even though she could simply buy paper that is already the proper shade.

Shahzia Sikander, I am also not my own enemy, 2009. Painted on paper which was ritualistically stained with tea. It is an excellent example of a work done ritualistically, since she spends days slowly, gradually staining the paper yellow before she even begins painting.

This beautiful work would fall into the “vanitas” artistic genre because it is using iconography to evoke thought of mortality. The white stag is iconographic in the Celtic civilization, and was later adopted in Medi Aevum(medieval) period of Western Europe as a symbol of death and transformation. 2 By having an icon which in legends generally leads the sick away for healing, dying in so graphic a manner it gives off a miasma of dread and hopelessness. The work is reminiscent of Kiki Smith’s Monument to Witches that depicts medicine women being burned alive, which was also done to show a spread of dread. The prime similarity being that the two works are both depicting symbols of healing dying horribly.

Kiki Smith, Woman on Pyre, 2001. It is a sculpture made from wood and stone. It depicts a medicine woman being burned on a pyre for witchcraft. it is quite similar to Mandy Greer's Small but Mighty Wandering Pearl, because it shows a source of healing suffering a horrible death.

Mandy Greer’s Small but Mighty Wandering Pearl is a contemporary work of vanitas. It depicts a scene of grotesque horror in a manner that captures the imagination with its detailed beauty. Its malign aesthetic forces one to meditate on this mortal coil.