Sculpture 'Cihuateteo'
The Royal Academy of ... Dead Foetuses, Mothers, Sailors, Guns & Ferrets
‘Cihuateteo’
2020 [2007]
70cms x 45cms x 48cms
Michael Lisle-Taylor
Kevla, cast form of pregnant woman [eight months with Twins], United Nations Uniform cotton drill & badge, metal fastenings, webbing, foam, cotton thread.
Bomb Disposal Equipment: size - pregnant woman 8 month + United Nations uniform cover.
The Cihuateteo “Divine Women” Were the Aztec spirits of human women who died in childbirth, which was considered a form of battle, and its victims were honoured as fallen warriors.
Exhibited : Royal Academy of Art, 2021 -2022
I came of age under the governance of the Iron Lady and HRH Elizabeth II - with Jamie Reid’s safety pin through her nose, the love and maternal completeness of my mother, counsel of two resident wise old grans and guidance from a benevolent godmother who formed a nurturing matriarchal bubble around me. I painted Cruella de Vil on my t-shirts, Siouxsie Sioux on my walls and named my ferrets after the New Avenger ‘Purdey’ and ‘Boudicea’ the queen of Celtic Britons. I expect Sophocles and Sigmund Freud would have some oedipal reason for my ferret’s names, but beyond this I was mostly intimidated by girls my own age. I was shy and they were always more interested in older boys, especially ones with cars and my BMX just didn’t cut it. I loved their company perhaps out of curiosity more than understanding, but was never confident enough to form a relationship, opting to medicate short term encounters with cheap vodka and home-brew. I can’t say joining the military was a very progressive step in this respect either, a sailors reputation proceeds him, for fair reason. For the first seven years of my sea service women were not allowed to sail with us and homosexuals male or female -if caught- were arrested, convicted and dishonourably discharged. I always found this institutionalised homophobia peculiar, it was actively encouraged and totally at odds with all cultural perceptions. I had a torrent of ‘soap on a rope’, ‘don’t bend over in the shower' quips from my civilian friends when I joined. After all, you just can’t get a bigger icon of gayness than a sailor in uniform, then or now. I certainly had my fair share of uninvited chaperones to the toilet , when the mere mentioned of my naval service entered conversation at fashion parties I was plus-one to. As for being a young lad, in his prime of his life spending weeks and weeks in the North Atlantic, with hormones raging and not a women in sight, it felt very remiss to me. But in 1993 the navy changed, well for the girls it did! it took another seven years for full integration of LGBQT sailors.
In the beginning, it was a bit of a culture shock for this male bastions, some policies were clumsily implemented, but in time as the precursory attitudes retired and proved Archean, the Forces caught up with the wider society. When I first started in art school I was still invested in the field of this cultural shift, curious about the nuances and idiosyncrasies of mixed service life, partnering the wider civilianising and nurturing policies that had been introduced. There were ongoing dialogues, about women in the special forces, bomb disposal and infantry roles. Alongside a whole raft of scandals, including sex trafficking by United Nations Peace Keepers and the torture of captives by military prison guards. The military character was as such coming under increasingly greater scrutiny. It wasn’t really the questions over gender that interested me, it seemed overly politicised. I thought in most people’s lived experience gender was hardly a binary condition. The women on our squadrons were completely interchangeable with the men and brought a welcome sense of balance to our microcosm. Especially during the longer stints at sea on Her majesties aircraft carriers during the Bosnian conflict. It appeared obvious that individuals regardless of sex demonstrate huge spectrums of strengths and weaknesses, in all kinds of physically demanding and psychologically stressful environments. I was more interested in how society distanced itself from the true function of their soldiers. I wrote around these issues in three repetitive essay’s on Groundhog Day and one on ‘The Politically Correct Warrior’. My very progressive professor who marked it, told me he was groaning most of the way through my rant. But said I nearly had him convince at the bit where I described how the US Army reduced the distance in the hand grenade throwing assessment in order to get females recruits across the pass mark. A distance that now fell well with in the shell’s unsafe burst area.
In 2002 at the Royal Academy of Art’s ‘Aztecs’ exhibition, a small stone carving ‘Cihuateteo’ ["Divine Woman.”] found in Mexico city, caught my attention. My wife had recently suffered a first miscarriage and reading the caption, the piece instantly resonated with me. It was discovered whilst excavating the foundations of the Casa Bóker department store. The site unwittingly shared its footprint with a former Aztec temple dedicated to women who died in childbirth. The exhibit was one of five identical carvings found there in 1896; each sculpted figure sat on their ankles and wore a plain skirt, with a simple knot belt tied around the waist, leaving breasts exposed. Its large disc eyes were set in an emaciated, living dead face with gritted teeth, framed by the tangled hair of a corpse. The Cihuātēotl held her menacing claw-like hands in front of her, ready to seize her prey. Aztec culture regarded childbirth equivalent to battle and honoured women who died in child birth as fallen male warriors who died in violent conflict. They deified such women as either ‘Cihuateteo’ [Divine Women], ‘Ciuapipiltin’ [Princesses] or ‘Mociuaquetzque’ [Valiant Women] . The spirits of those dying in labour and on the battle field were given the exclusive work of guiding the sun across the sky, from sunrise to sunset in the West also called Cihuatlampa “place of women”. The five Cihuateteo found in Mexico city each had a calendrical name carved in their crown ‘I-Eagle’ ‘I-Deer’, ‘I-Rain’, ‘I-House’ and ‘I-Monkey’, which was carved in to the one shown at the RA belonging to the British Museum. These were the five days that these malevolent spirits returned to the mortal realm to haunt crossroads in the hope of snatching the young children they were never privileged to have.
I was sitting alone in a treatment room, in my wheel chair, adjacent to the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar’s Orthopaedic ward. Gritting my teeth, I gingerly pulled at the corner of a rectangular dressing on my inner thigh. A few weeks previously during Field Gun Crew drills for the 1993 Royal Tournament competition, a 900 lb gun barrel had landed on my foot at speed from a height of ten feet. My boot burst open like a crisp packet, with my foot inside, twenty years later bits of bone are still migrating up my leg. Command Field Gun has been called a “section by section ballet of extreme violence.” and involves an eighteen man team taking an artillery field gun and limber ammunition box over an obstacle course. It is a timed competition between two Royal Navy crews, who take the kit apart, to manoeuvre it through holes, over walls, chasms, swings and wires, only re-assembling it to fire three shots at two actions and for race to the finish. Bad drills invariably result in casualties and each running member has a couple of reserves watching every move, ready to step in, when he’s broken. From two years running field gun in 1990 and 1993 I had a tally of nine surgical operations not including stitches that were sewn up trackside with indifference. The sailor who dropped the barrel was in the bed next to me -until the nurses separate us- for a couple of days while they removed a finger to enable him to return to the competition. I was counting my self lucky having been told initially I was going to lose my foot. My surgeon had recently returned from the Gulf War and was practiced in a technique he’d honed in the field hospital. In theatre they had received a lot of Iraqi soldiers, suffering from gunshot wounds to their feet, believed to be self inflicted to get out of the fight. The surgeon said my injury was a ‘gunshot wound’ and he would treat it the same way; basically laying me up, with foot raised and cutting away the dead tissue each week, until the foot stopped dying. He would then lie a piece of new skin over the hole and let the foot rebuild itself. The following year the same accident happened to another sailor doing exact the same job, but unfortunately for him, they removed his leg just below the knee. I had been in that treatment room all morning trying to remove the dressing, from my skin graft donor site, fending off the nurses with “I’ll do it, I’ll do it myself”. Then just before lunch there was a sudden slam as the swing doors threw open and Sister swept across the room and tore the dressing off. The air instantly left my lungs and an arctic flush swept my body. As she left me pathetic and speechless, unable to even ‘eeek’ or scream she turned and declared with a smile ‘That’s the closest, you will ever get to childbirth’.
I met my future wife a fortnight later at the Royal Tournament. The doctors were pleased to see me standing for the first time in nearly two months, issued me a pair of crutches and turned a blind eye when I travel to Earls Court for the last day of the competition. The weekend was good for the soul and life as it happed! but medically far too much, too soon. I was back in hospital for another two weeks come Monday, with a foot the colour of a Black Bearded Iris and size of a melon. This was one of several injuries that qualified me for a small ‘war pension’ when I left the Forces. As a recipient of this payment, in 2010 Royal Holloway University and University College London asked me to take part in some veterans health research. The next thing I knew; I was being grilled in an interview about military experiences and my emotions, trawling through images of urban, sub-urban and the countryside scenes on a computer screen with different eyes, assessing their threat levels and wandering around Tottenham Court Road with a electronic backpack and helmet on with two unwieldily camcorders attached to a frame pointing at each eye. It turned out the professors were actually carrying out government funded research into Immediate-Onset and Delayed-Onset Post traumatic Stress Disorder in Military Veterans. It was difficult and felt fraudulent to talk about any peritraumatic or posttraumatic emotions related to service events, knowing the incomparable horrors my grandfather experienced. I believed I said that any reactions to uncomfortable military events were usually medicated through alcohol and humour and I didn’t think I had any legacy of anger, shame or flash back. She asked me if it would be possible to interview my wife to see if she noticed any behavioural issues. I told her I would ask, but thought she would be too busy, she works in fashion and its the London shows… The researcher's final line of questions were concerning any non-service traumatic events. She nearly had kittens when I said we had twin daughters, preceded by eight miscarriages including a set of twins dying 3 weeks apart and pre-eclampsia during the caesarean section that nearly left me a single parent. Asking how we dealt with the stress I said ‘alcohol and humour’ and keeping a couple of the dead children in jars in our freezer to reduce the sense of loss. Pregnancy is so visual with modern technology, you see the human emerge, then see their hearts expire, it is every bit as visceral as battlefield steeped in pain, tears, camaraderie, spilt blood, fluids and screams, with tissue penetrated, by penis, needle, steel speculums, vacuums, optimism, disappointment, anger, shame, victory and blissful joy. My wife is one of the strongest people I know a worthy warrior, she suffers the legacy of her conflict but fortunately for her family is no ‘Cihuateteo’ escorting the sun. She ‘on the ground’ telling us to pick up our dirty clothes and turn the music down.
Cihuateteo is a cast of a woman, eight months pregnant with twins. The form created was laminated with several layers of gold and black weave Kevlar and internally padded with black foam for comfort. A bespoke United Nations uniform cover with heavy duty shoulder straps, buckles and waist band fits over the torso shell and is secured with draw strings and hook & loop. The shoulder and waist straps secure to a back piece that houses a Kelva ballistics plate, in a pocket to protect the heart. The sculpture was executed during the UK’s first Covid lockdown. It was simultaneously created along side and sharing blue thread with the sculpture ‘Moral Injury’ 2020. This artwork involved making a couple of pairs of scrubs for the NHS and various amalgams, using the scrubs pattern and an Inuit seal gut parka pattern copied from an exhibit seen at the British Museum on the eve of the lockdown.