In Depth: Atropa Mandragora

Alicia Bailey, Atropa Mandragora, 2003,
Glass book with box, pages etched and fired
glass, coptic binding, edition of five, box dimensions
10" x 8" x 3", courtesy of the artist

I often find myself talking with either visual people or literary people (or, as I like to think of them, "look people" or "book people"). Because of this, I've had many occasions to hear arguments in favor of, in turn, the supremacy of the image over the word and the supremacy of the word over the image, especially in terms of communicating ideas. The "look people" will tell you that there is no purer or more effective way of communicating than to come upon an image and, in one instant, see and know everything that you need to know. "Book people" will scoff at this naïve approach to knowledge and argue that a logical and linear approach laid out in textual form is far superior to any image. I'm not sure how well the more extreme individuals in each of these groups would deal with Alicia Bailey's Atropa Mandragora. Ms. Bailey's piece takes the best of these two approaches to communication and forges them together by binding plates of glass that have been drawn and written upon. This collapsing of two disparate elements into one is not limited to the visual and the literary. Ms. Bailey's piece uses the medium of glass and the genres of prose and illustration to fuse and blend divergent forms and ideas until it becomes impossible to tell one from another.

Atropa Mandragora takes its name from a plant that has featured prominently in folklore for centuries. Harry Potter fans will not be surprised to read the roots of the mandrake plant resemble human bodies. While the form of the mandragora root does not resemble humans as literally as the plants described in Ms. Rowling's books, there is an undeniable resemblance between humans and mandrake roots. While, certainly, the mandrake/mandragora offers up paths into creation stories and the weirder bits and pieces of folklore, it also draws our attention to the idea of multiplicity--the idea that one thing can be many and vice versa. In addition to being both plantlike and human in form, the mandrake has acquired a reputation for being everything from an aphrodisiac to an hallucinogenic capable of inducing a coma. Quite a powerful plant, don't you think? The hallucinogenic properties, in addition to summoning up images of the psychedelic sixties, reveal the mandrake's status as a symbol of multiplicity. When hallucinating, one can mistake any ordinary object for an infinite number of other people, places, and things. Indeed, given the mandrake's reality-bending powers, it isn't hard to understand how many of the legends surrounding the plant came to be. Simply ingesting a mandrake root can cause a person to lose touch with reality and enter a state of...*ahem*...expanded consciousness--or, as the look and book people might say, a new way of receiving ideas.



Given all of this, Bailey's choice to use the mandrake as the anchoring idea in her glass book seems nothing less than inspired. Since the "lookers" are strong advocates of order and linearity, I'll begin my explanation of this statement with the text of Bailey's book. Bailey includes snippets of information about mandrakes--both the folkloric screaming plants and the actual hallucinogenic ones--in her book. The text, in addition to its didactic function, is an ornate decoration of the book. One can, with varying levels of clarity, see every word that Bailey has written on the glass. Because of this, a reader or viewer of the piece can take in every word at once. The text itself becomes visual art. This idea is reenforced by Bailey's decision to use light colored ink to write the words. the side of the glass panes that directly face the drawn images are etched with compact floral designs. These etchings have the same light value as the ink that Bailey has used to write about the mandrake plant. As such, the words nearly disappear in to the etched designs when a view looks from the back of the book toward the front. The words blend and merge with the etched design, a process that turns the text into visual art. Depending upon the focus of one's eyes, the text is either invisible, a part of the design, or a collection of words used to communicate information. This illusory quality of the text and etchings mirrors the multiplicity inherent to Bailey's subject (the mandrake).

Once the text dissolves into decoration, it falls to the drawn image to communicate the significance of the mandragora to the viewer. Bailey's drawings show a mandrake that is almost scientifically rendered, a man holding a mandrake root close to his groin (probably a reference to the root's storied past as an aphrodisiac), a half-woman half-plant hybrid (likely to show the similarities of the human form and the mandrake's form), and other variations on the human/mandrake form. The images are visual representations of the mandrake's properties and accompanying legends. Such is the nature of the piece that, despite the clarity of the glass panes, one cannot see every image at once when the book is closed. The minute floral etchings on the back of each pane of glass present just enough of a visual boundary between one drawing and the next that one can only see each image if one changes the focus of one's eyes. As the focus of the eyes change and each subsequent image is revealed, time passes and the viewer's gaze is drawn deeper and deeper into the book. Through changing the focus of one's eyes, the instantaneous nature of viewing a piece of art is transformed into a linear experience with clear beginning, middle, and end points. In effect, the process of seeing Bailey's drawings mimics the process of reading a passage in a book.

Atropa Mandragora, then, makes  the instantaneous linear and the linear instantaneous. It blends the visual and the literary in such a way that one's head spins and one wonders whether somebody slipped some mandrake root in the office coffee pot. In Baileys piece there is no real difference between a linear and an instantaneous acquisition of knowledge, a man and a plant, or text and image--or, at least, there's only a difference if one focuses one's eyes in a particular way. Bailey has, with the ideological anchor of the mandrake root, managed to dissolve the bounds between the literary and the visual. In doing so, she has, like the hallucinogenic mandrake root, offered her audience a new way of seeing the world.