Claire Grant
“I CAN HEAR BELLS RINGING IN MY BIG TOE”

1. THE BIG TOE

“the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes.

[…]

Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

We hug our little destiny again.”1

In 2018 I had surgery on my left big toe. In 2019 I met Jacquie Meng.

I’d been ignoring an injury. They had to break and realign the bone, and now there’s a pin through it. I didn’t do the physio exercises after the operation, so my balance is still off. I can’t really stand on one foot, so I can’t do standing poses during yoga. I stick to the floor. This hurts my shoulders, which are already overcompensating for my neck. I found out my neck is hypermobile, actually, after crashing my dad’s car and getting whiplash.

There are a lot of ways to think about the body as segmented­—in pain.

I’ve sat and watched Jacquie paint for hours at a time since we met. Her paintings make me think about the body in other ways. In 2024 I wrote about vulgarity, play and the carnivalesque for her solo show The World Is My Playground. In 2026 we made a book together for her show Smile, called Walking Around Looking For Teeth, where two characters go out looking for their bodies. Now that she’s more centrally incorporating sculpture into her practice, something new is emerging from her warped proportions and object assemblage.

Why is the foot huge and the big toe central? Once on the phone Jacquie and I were talking about George Bataille’s concept of ‘base materialism’.2 His theory starts with the big toe, as the first point of the anatomical difference used to differentiate humans from animals: bipedalism. Enlightenment thinkers elevated the mind as representative of the divine, the highest point of the body, taking it away from the ‘base’. Our head is up there thanks to the big toe, down on the ground, in the dirt. Bataille liked writing about the mutual contingencies of supposed opposites; that everything high is fundamentally reliant on everything low. He liked thinking with the big toe as a disruptor.

So do I.

I thought about reliance a lot when I had to keep my foot elevated for 22 hours a day, for three weeks, recovering.

Yes, yes. The tight gag, the bite, the hug. The body meets with time and changes in it.

I can hear the pin clicking now.

1. DISPROPORTION AND THE CHAOTIC IMAGINATION

“a chaotic imagination… definition beyond the deterrence of power, the dominant ideologies of history, and the conspiracies of identity.”3

Jacquie Meng’s warped, disproportionate, uncanny bodies assemble and dislocate commonsense experiences of history, identity, and power though a chaotic imagination of the self. Then abandoned: left alone in the window, the self reclines so far back that it falls out of the picture. What reemerges is an unstable and porous subject-object assemblage and a discordant sound piece, playing at chance intervals. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh writes that in chaotic literature “a text’s unreality unlocks a new sensibility—one of disturbance over doubt, anticipatory risk over randomness, swathing everything it touches in an unsecured elation…where thought itself tears across the borders of time and space”.4 Meng’s bodily unreality tears across definitions and supposed opposites with a chaotic sensibility, and with elation.

When Jacquie and I became friends, my past and future felt clarified. My inner space shifted around our friendship and her practice genuinely changed me. The body is not fractured and segmented. It is a boundless and strange assemblage. Now when I look, I see differently; though uncanny, wide eyes.