Four Thieves Vinegar
- Sydney Shen
Four thieves’ vinegar is an elixir fabled to have been developed by French grave robbers during a historical outbreak of bubonic plague, to protect themselves from infection by the corpses they plundered. Perfumed with a recreated four thieves' vinegar recipe, Shen’s installation revisits medieval folk plague cures, considering their continuity and relevance amid contemporary notions of belief, health, and self-care.
Sydney Shen, Four Thieves Vinegar (installation view), Springsteen, Baltimore, 2017. Courtesy the artist.
Untitled. Lavender, ribbon, garlic, baby’s breath. Before germs were known to cause disease, miasma theory suggested sickness was spread by inhaling foul-smelling vapours. Medicinal plants and herbs serve as miasma-thwarting scents.
Left to right: Peccantum me quotidie; I Want My Scream to Count; My Corpse Burns and the Fire is Sweet; Crudelissima Doglia. 3D-printed plastic, black velvet flocking, ribbon. A series of flyswatters anticipate death and decomposition. The swatting mesh designs are inspired by the melancholic Italian early-Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who developed unusual remedies to alleviate his health conditions, which were seen as lapses of spirituality.
Timor Mortis Conturbat Me. CNC cut and faux-finished wood, star anise. A manhole cover engraved with Timor Mortis Conturbat Me (fear of death disturbs me), a refrain common to medieval poetic laments. References to sanitation infrastructure carry across suspended Shaker-style chairs in the installation, which evoke the curative folk advice to “sit in the sewers.”
Four Thieves Vinegar (detail). Citrus, cloves, glass urinal, baby’s breath, four thieves vinegar. Shen’s recreated four thieves’ vinegar recipe is diffused in repurposed urine-collection vessels. Bodily fluids and odours are a main target of miasma theory; here, the collection vessel is rendered as protector rather than perpetrator.
Sydney Shen’s sculptures probe contradictions such as fear and wonder, pain and pleasure, sacred and profane. She destabilizes motifs of the macabre, especially those that test the limits of the body, to evoke ambivalent states. Recent solo exhibitions include Onion Master, New Museum, New York; and Every Good Boy Does Fine, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna. Shen is a 2019–20 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace resident. She received the 2019 Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, Queens Museum, New York; and the 2018 New Works Grant, Queens Art Fund, New York. She graduated from the Cooper Union in 2011.
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