paul wirhun :: contemporary

egg erotica: contemporary

Using classical Greek pottery as its starting point, I continue to create erotica on eggshells. After a period of copying figures from classical pottery, I began by the late 1990’s to create new eggs from mixing these ancient images in ways that fit my own personal fantasies. During this time I started developing techniques for working on eggshells (scratching, brush painting with dyes and painting with bleach on a dyed shell) that allowed me a new visual vocabulary for representing the human figure. In the past few years I have moved from using pottery imagery to my own erotic photography for references in creating a new body of Contemporary erotica.

Eggshells are a wonderful medium to manifest erotica – for they connote (in themselves) not only new life, new beginnings, but the sexual union necessary for their very existence. Within each shell lies the balance of female and male sexual energies, a perfect metaphor for an essential human struggle – how to balance the various components of our personalities: desires, dreams, ego, shadow, spirit. Each eggshell is an event itself and the image drawn on its surface enacts a particular phenomenon.

The facility of the shell for a range of techniques (batiking, scratching, painting, gilding) affords me a great range of visual expression to manifest erotic ideas, events, and fantasies. All this intentional imagery is created on a three-dimensional object that is so weightless in the hand as to effect a paradox of meaning, suggesting how ephemeral this physical world appears.