Ephemeral Skin
When
we view our own bodies, rather than perceiving it holistically as others do, we
see it in fragments. Our hand holding a pen and a thumb and part of our other
hand visible as we hold the book in which we write. Often, in the looking and
subsequent consciousness of our partial bodies we become conscious of smooth or
rough areas of skin, surfaces blemishes and plump soft blue veins running
beneath a translucent surface. The ridges and crevices, soft mounds, gentle
undulations, bones and joints crisscrossed with furrows through persistent
movement or areas red with inflammation; the partial body appears as an alien
but familiar landscape that arrests our view. With this in mind and being
painfully aware that I was ageing, I embarked on a surveillance of my bodily
surface, a photographic and forensic investigation of an imperceptible
transformation, an image of the self as exterior plane, not the self of
thought, but one related to membrane, not wrapped around a frame, but laid
horizontal and bare. A cartography or mapping in which discrete photographs of
fragments might suggest something other than the bodily parts initially
captured and a desire to see. The work is simultaneously document and
self-portrait depicting the ephemeral skin, but since it does not reveal the
identity of the artist, the skin could be from any body, thus universalizing the
imagery. By revealing the folds and surfaces of the body, its incompleteness,
its imperfect state, the artist invites the viewer to enter a plane of
intensity of the flattened body, rendered greater than before, moving towards
infinity and immanence.
Julie Clarke 2013
