Jennifer Calivas: Landscape and the Female Body

Jennifer Calivas uses a pre-existing element of nature within her work. Taken from 2019 to 2021, her series Self-Portrait While Buried depicts the artist buried within varying textures of earth, holding a wired timer shutter in her hands. While clearly personal too, Calivas’ photographs explore the wider issues of female subjugation within the natural environment. Historically, landscape paintings were associated with the female body. The landscape tradition gazed upon women through a lens of objectification, viewing rolling hills and fertile earth as extensions of the female form. One leading artist who took measures to tackle these longstanding ideals is Ana Mendieta, active during the 70s and 80s. Mendieta’s seminal Silueta series saw the artist creating imprints of the female form within sand, mud, grass, and rock. Using primarily natural materials (leaves, twigs, blood, fire), Mendieta created eerie recesses that once held the warmth of a body, left clearly lacking their human counterpart. Part performance, sculpture, and land art, Mendieta placed her body within natural environments in order to emphasise the societal conditions within which the female body is objectified.

Jennifer Calivas’ Self-Portrait While Buried series builds upon the wider feminist tradition that Mendieta introduced. Instead of leaving an absence where her body once lay, Calivas actively inserts her own figure within her photographs. In Self-Portrait While Buried #9, the artist’s body is visible, emerging beneath crumbling sand, darker pockets arising where her limbs recently rested. In the twelfth work of the series, the artist’s body is initially invisible, enveloped in layers of gelatinous mud. Dark reeds populate the right side of the composition, bristling with texture and obscuring a potentially hidden Calivas. Light dapples over the patchy mud, rippling over footprints and pools of murky water. Calivas’ hand finally becomes visible near the top of the picture plane, pointing resolutely towards the sky, held up above the marshland to avoid damaging her wired shutter. In these images, she exists within nature, buried within varying forms of earth.