Tattooed Lady: Comin’ Up Roses, from the Truncated series

In her artwork, Camille Eskell explores the experience of her Baghdadi-Jewish family in India and examines cultural and family dynamics through the themes of vulnerability, rebirth, gender relationships, and social convention. In this work and others, she uses the damaged body as a metaphor to explore the themes of duality, transformation, and transcendence.

Tattooed Lady: Comin’ Up Roses is an unnerving blend of sensuality and destruction. Beautifully painted with lush roses, the classically proportioned torso, seen in so many nineteenth-century sculptures, is here torn asunder. With teeth embedded in the figure’s innards, Eskell rejects serene idealism and replaces it with wild paganism and sexual violence run amuck.