Portrait

“I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not”

Lady Windermere’s Fan. Act IV. Oscar Wilde

LZM by Eric Magnuson

My Garden

Red. Pink amongst white. Pink amidst white. Pink. More pink. And the colour and the meeting of colours is redolent with scent.

Love Dance (for Willow)

A film by Eric Magnuson and Lisa Z. Morgan alias The Lavender Hinge a.k.a. The Whore's Omelette a.k.a. Swan & Horse Productions a.k.a Pink & eam. Knickers by STRUMPET & PINK. Soundtrack by Minutemen

Make Me (Pink and Black)

“Marriage is for cooling off the pink madness”  

James Hillman

Make Me (Pink and Black) by Christopher Wool, 2004. 104" x 78". Enamel and silk screen ink on linen.

Spinning

A film by Lisa Z. Morgan. From the Super 8 tryptich 'Spinning', 2001

Design Behind Desire

I was invited to author and curate a book about desire. This culminated in Design Behind Desire which was creatively developed with Susanne Schaal and published by Faramhmedia, New York, in December 2011. My favourite postings, to date, can be seen here at Purple Diary, Interview Magazine and from the wonderful Betony Vernon.

One of the most pleasurable aspects in the process of creating Design Behind Desire was the realization of The Cabinet of Desire. A small and unexpected volume; a book contained within the book whereby invited artists have written and contributed stand alone text pieces on the subject of desire; poems, essays, fiction, visual writings, experiences. The Cabinet is immersive, the paper is of a different quality and texture. It demonstrates the fluidity of desire and induces one's own mind imagery.

Cabinet of Desire

Lovers of Roissy by Emmanuelle Waeckerle

25 White Camellias + 5 Red Camellias

“For twenty-five days in every month the camellias were white, and for five they were red. No one ever knew the reason for this variation in colour which I mentioned but cannot explain, and which those who frequented the theatres where she was seen most often, and her friends too, had noticed as I had.

Marguerite had never been seen with any flowers but camellias.”

  La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas  
 

"Rosette Cheeks (exploded and capped)" at the V&A

“If I eat a pink cake, the taste of it is pink; the light sugary perfume, the oiliness of the butter cream are the pink. Thus I eat the pink as I see the sugary.”

  J.P. Sartre

STRUMPET & PINK's "Rosette Cheeks (exploded and capped)" is now part of the permanent collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 'She' is now currently touring with the exhibition Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion.

Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Pink-ness No.6 - a perfume

Pink-ness No.6 by Lisa Z. Morgan, 2001. 14cm x 4cm x 4cm.
Perfume, laboratory glass, handmade box lined with hand dyed 100% pure silk.
Edition of 100

“Pink-Ness No.6”. Edition of 100.  The intention behind communicating pink-ness in a non-visual manner liberated this rosy hue from its more manufactured and debased, exterior, associations, such as Barbie, candy floss and bubble gum. I sensed that an odour could make manifest my feeling of the pink as it has the ability to capture emotion and access the vernacular of bodily or instinctive understanding. Smells pass into and out of our bodies, tracing our internal landscape with their tides.

Spatially, within the scent itself, I wanted there to be tiers of permeating aromatics, so that the scent moved and developed as one engaged with it, shifting with time and temperature. The first intake of breath should have an emergent powdery waft, doused with a heady odour of rose. This more literal association towards pink was a means to disarm, to dilute resistance to the approaching intimate experience. The scent awakens with the temperature of the body and it slowly ascends to a deep and visceral fecund pink. The sexual smell of bodies merging and being sensorially open. One could converge with its fragrance as much in the groin as in the solar plexus. At this point, one no longer thinks of pink ‘things’, rather one comes to know the pink via direct internal experience.

Pink-ness No.6 is currently part of the exhibition Selling Sex at SHOWstudio, London which runs until 1st June.

Introducing The Pink Investigator

"The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its aparellel evolution through to the end."

Deleuze

I may not be the Pink Panther but I am The Pink Investigator. Perhaps this transgresses the boundary of seriousness, for it appears to threaten the very confines of objectivity seemingly necessary for the act of investigation. Yet, the colour pink* will be both the impetus and continuum, the conceptual whole, as explored through visual documentation, musings, ideas and output which engender inquiry and make flourish the investigative journey.
*pink-ness as an expression and/or embodiment of the sensuous