Amanda Moström. ‘itsanosofadog *It’s an arse of a dog’

About

Extracts taken from a conversation between Richard Francis and Amanda Moström

RF: So what about the keyholes? Yeah, where did they come from?

AM: I’ve shown you those books, haven’t I? The old Japanese magazines, well, I suppose it is pornography.

AM: It comes back to the place of the erotic simply being a way of figuring out where your urgencies are at, and where you feel motivated to the degree of wanting to do something wholly and with passion and lust, and it being like, such a source and such an energy, I think that’s my forever hunt to try to get my head around. I think that that’s what I have witnessed with my nan. Seeing someone create and make for their own sake, the way that nan was making work, and her engagement with it, it’s very similar to masturbation, it’s for no one else’s sake and no one’s ever gonna see and no one’s ever gonna capitalise on and no one’s ever gonna ask for, no one’s ever gonna know of. 

Like, it’s, it’s a completely sort of sacred moment just for her. And I think for me, that is always something that I’m so, so hungry to be sniffing at and keep active with.

My obsession with it is because I’m quite a melancholic person, I have reoccurring depression and often struggle with my own urgencies day to day. So anything that could be a mine of a sort, to excavate the gold of individuals urgencies and kinks if you like. Everyday kinks, yours, my mums, the neighbours, it’s intriguing to me and I’m in awe to see and witness these.

AM: I want to talk about the keyholes in the show, I started working with Alpaca fleece when I was living at the farm, and it was a material that I had an abundance of, and quite quickly I developed a relationship with the tactile handling of a raw material.

As the alpacas are my sisters I know when they’ll get sheered, I have seen the seasons and weathers the fur has been in, I know the bodies and beings of the fur personally which makes handling the raw material an intimate experience.

When I first started working with the Alpaca fleece I was trying to recreate skins, but doing so on canvas, using the sheered fleece and gluing it onto canvas. Then I was spending lots of time brushing and grooming the fleece, treating it like precious and attentive barber time I would spend hours and hours and hours brushing and trimming the fleece, so that became a quite an endearing process.

RF: Quite an erotic relationship. Brushing and grooming, it’s very stimulating that kind of process.

AM: And a very loving act to spend so much time brushing and cutting and shaping. And with the keyholes I knew I wanted to use alpaca and I knew I wanted it to be furry but I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be groomed or if it was gonna be wild. And I think my decision has been to leave them un-groomed. I see a bush. I see pubic hair, I see protection for genitalia, for orgasm. It’s a real protective frame for what is to be seen in the keyhole.

RF: It’s the signifier for the erotic, or the idea of the joie de vivre, or what is, like, your mojo, when you want to actually get up in the morning and you’ve got something that actually kind of just arouses you into existence.

AM: Exactly, the most precious thing, right?

RF: So the image inside the keyhole, rather than being traditionally a sexualised image of a body, female or male, because it could be either couldn’t it. Is one of a…

AM: It’s a bitch.

RF: Well its an arse of a dog, I couldn’t lift its tail in the photograph so.

AM: It starts off that she’s in another room, and there’s a gate in the doorway and the puppies are in the room, the breeder opens the gate, and she comes into the room, and they’re all falling over her, overly excited.

And I was thinking about that the other day, actually, I was texting with a friend, and we were talking about something really exciting, a moment later she wrote, ‘shit, I’m really anxious now.’ And it made me think about how close excitement and anxiety sit as a registered feeling. And it really made me think of the puppies, and how to the naked eye, you look at those puppies and go, ‘they are so excited.’

But I think the likely experience that the bitch Labrador mum was getting was this high intensity, it’s either real excitement or real anxiety, and you don’t have so much control over what path you end up going down. And I think that’s the bulk of what that whole video is communicating to me. She’s entering the space, and all the puppies are really excited. And she then sets the tone and tells them all off. She keeps on disciplining them to this calm, yawning, lying down energy instead.

And yeah, it’s a really short video, you know, like we watched it together but it’s, like you said, you can tell from her stance, even just a little glimpse of seeing her arse. It’s very clear education. You can read it very easily.

So I remember, when I first saw the video, it was my best friend who sent it to me, and at the time, I was having a moment, I was quite anxious. We had been sending each other meditation videos, breathing exercises, all this sort of stuff to aid me and to aid us in this little life.

And then she came across this video and it showed all these things were talking about trying to discipline and manage your emotions and like your being in the world kind of thing. I must have watched it hundreds of times, and I still think it’s the most, inspiring, I don’t know, like the most, just something very generous and important about that moment.

At the time I was reading about folk music, the idea of verbal communication outside of formal language, that isn’t words necessarily, or are words that don’t belong to one language, that isn’t based upon a formal education nor related to your social status, and it was around that time, when I saw this video it was speaking to me on that level, storytelling, educating, or sharing of knowledge to some degree.

That would have been passed on through generations and edited and changed and moved without any kind of borders, without any real hold in language, necessarily without a singular author, like more wholly? Outside of individualism and strict form or control. An authorship that is a shared one, a shared experience, a shared existence.

RF: Do you think there are good dog mothers and bad dog mothers, or do you think, as a species that there is some instinctual, kind of protective measures that is to temper excitement, to actually not let them get carried away. It’s about training, isn’t it?

It’s like you can have a level of excitement, but you have to also have respect, and you have to understand your position. And then because all those things go for making a good dog family society, you can’t have six bosses in a pack, there’s hierarchies that go down. So it’s sort of behavioural training. Isn’t it? Just like if you kick up a fuss, you’re gonna have to fight.

AM: Yeah. Well which is what I think was my general take from it, when I saw the video, I am trying to behaviourally train myself to function better in my life, in myself, with everyone else around me. Seeing that kind of training so directly in such a short little clip.

RF: So that’s what you mean, it is not coming direct from her. It’s a known kind of code of conduct. That she’s instilling them in order that they can survive.