17 April 2025

Of Flesh and Porcelain

Ariadne Maraya

I have always been drawn to the human body, not in its idealized form but in its raw and unguarded state. There is something enduring in its contradictions that continues to hold me: the way it carries softness and brutality in equal measure, the way it can be so undeniably beautiful and yet deeply repelling, the way it holds strength in one breath and collapses into vulnerability in the next.

My earliest memories of this fascination trace back to my aunt’s dental clinic. I was only meant to wait there—quiet in the corner, passing time. But I was always watching. I saw her open mouths, pull teeth, tend to wounded gums. I remember the way people surrendered to her touch. How they tilted their heads back and gave up control. There was something intimate in it, something unspoken. A tension that lived between care and exposure.

In this series, I return again and again to the mouth. Not because it is beautiful, but because it is honest. It is where language lives, where we taste and nourish, where we express desire and tension. We try to control it—polish it, whiten it, fix it—but it is unpredictable. A slip of the tongue, a bleeding gum, a cracked tooth. The smallest disruptions always begin here.

The early works center on maintenance, or the performance of it—acts like flossing until the gums bleed, pulling teeth with manicured nails, scraping tongues until they’re raw. These gestures resemble care but are grounded in control. They reveal how the routines we associate with healing can carry quiet violence, how intimacy can turn invasive when taken to an extreme. I became drawn to that tension—the way tenderness can slowly edge into discomfort without fully announcing the shift.

Adornment appears throughout—gold grills, tooth gems, red chapped lips, sharp nails. These aren’t just decorative. They speak to care and control, but also to tension. Beauty becomes both shield and vulnerability. Red lips especially hold weight for me. Wearing red has always felt like a choice to be seen, to take up space. It’s not just about looking good—it’s about presence. There’s defiance in it, softness too. For me, red is a way to say, I’m here. It’s a quiet kind of power.

As the series continues, aesthetic modifications are removed. Bleeding subsides. What remains are signs of neglect—untreated decay, periodontal recession, calculus accumulation. The later paintings present the body in a state of deterioration, without embellishment. Still, a kind of intimacy persists in the exposure. Honest. Perhaps even tender.

This series is not just about the mouth as a physical space. It’s about everything it contains: desire, damage, expression, and shame. It’s about the rituals we perform to hold ourselves together—and the ways those rituals can fail. It’s about the contradiction of being human. Flesh is always vulnerable. Porcelain is always at risk of breaking.