Mediaeval Baebes: Songs of the Flesh

The notorious Mediaeval Baebes are a true paradox: they live a life of passion and excess, yet the songs they sing weave a seductive tapestry of purity and haunting beauty. The girls' friendship and fascination with Mediaeval music brought them together as a musical group of twelve in 1996. Now the Baebes' "classical music with a saucy slant" has been taken a step further with the publication of Songs of the Flesh, which combines the intimate with the elusive and the innocent with the sinister. This volume of nude photographs and drawings by the young Russian, Vania Zouravliov, stars The Mediaeval Baebes as you've never seen them before, and includes a text by Baebe Marie Findley that gives a Middle Ages interpretation to their often erotic dreams.

"The desire to escape to a world more alluring and romantic than our own is the very essence of The Mediaeval Baebes. Everything that has been written about us, up to now, has focused on our personal lives and how they conflict with the Mediaeval material we perform. And so we wanted to produce a work that could still be revealing, without being prosaic; a text, unlike our official biographies, that could comfortably combine personal intimacy with an evocation of the past. Above all, we felt it was important to find words that would serve to enhance the photographic work of Vania Zouravliov. And so here is a compilation of our dreams, along with appropriate imagery, and a discussion of Mediaeval methods of interpreting them.

"The past is a distant place, hazily remembered; so too are one's dreams. They may be full of unfamiliar faces, exotic creatures you have never seen and bizarre rules of conduct. The Middle Ages were coloured with high contrast: optimistic tales of chivalry, courtly love, religious devotion and sacrifice were juxtaposed with bawdy, raw and lowly visions of life. The exalted visions lived alongside stories of toil, penance, poverty and disease.
   We find the same contrast in our dreams. We have all experienced the intense pleasure of a fairy tale dream; equally, we can all recall the times we have floundered helplessly in the depths of black nightmare."

Vania Zouravliov's work mirrors these themes. Vania, who says he works intuitively from his subconscious, produces illustrations that are simultaneously uplifting and disturbing. His photographs are shot through with ethereal symbolism and religious iconography. These are all images that thrive in our dreamscape.