Rowan Roscher

My degree show project Shrine to Navel Gazing invites you to reconsider your relationship towards your bellybutton as a portal to introspection and interconnection.

I treat language as a material in my practice, taking philosophical and fictional inspiration. In particular I am interested in eating and digestion: an area often dismissed by post-enlightenment philosophy which has treated the mind and body as separate.  

The phrase ‘navel-gazing’ derives from the ancient Greek tradition of 'omphaloskepsis', the act of gazing at one’s belly button in an act of contemplation. This work questions the negative connotations of  ‘navel gazing’ in Western usage as self-indulgent, instead meditating on the bellybutton as a symbolic site where we digest our world, politics, emotions, cultures, and, in a sense, each other.

Bellybuttons provoke intimacy, humour, and connotate nourishment, being a kind of former mouth. They signify both the borders and the permeability of the body; a reminder of our embodied existence and human interconnections.

The starting point of this work was a series of anxious dreams in response to the diet-affecting illness of somebody that I love. My mind conjured images of the inside of my body in detail. These images have inspired the development of the ceramic forms and fabric components of this work. My ‘jelly bellies’, are fleshy, unstable, relishing in the materiality of jelly which connotates both fear (“I turned to jelly”), and celebration.