The Fifth House (2025), Avni Doshi
I’m interested in the work of Carl Jung and have been informally studying astrology for more than a decade. The work I’ve done for the show, entitled the fifth house, refers to the fifth house in the astrological chart which is said to rule children and creative expression. The work began as a text which I wrote, the story of a mother/writer who faces the rupturing of identity, attention and consciousness as she negotiates how to be both things. I realised the text begins with a fall, and I’ve come to see it as a kind of descent story. A more mundane motherhood version of Inanna going to meet her own darkness. I created a series of images - they’re works of digital collage - where the text was incorporated in various ways. The images are made up of photographs from my own archive, as well as fragments of alchemical images, renaissance paintings, and Hindu and Jain art. Interspersed are line drawings and other markings to map the mother’s movement throughout a given day. The movement of her thoughts and her body. In this cosmological imagining, the planetary bodies and the human body reflect each other. I’m interested in movement and mess as archetypal phenomena.
PRINTS
TEXT
