“The skin figures. It is what we see and know of others and ourselves, we show ourselves in and on our skins, and our skins figure out the things we are and mean.” 1
Skin is a visual signifier not only of our identity but a record of our lived experiences. “Skin re-members, both literally in its material surface and metaphorically in re-signifying on this surface.” 2 Jay Prosser implies that meaning is ascribed to skin and can be read by others like a document. Skin can be a form of archive; a site and sight for the memory of our encounters. Conveying past and present, this visual record anchors memory through the traces on its surface.
Preserving the residual traces on my own skin, I aim to elevate these overlooked markers of history through an autobiographical lens. Isolating these fragments by utilizing a medium that has indexical properties and employing archival strategies, I aim to highlight the complex relationship between the represented and the representation. These degenerate copies have an existential connection like photographs and retain a ‘having been thereness’ to the objects they portray. 3 The index is susceptible to degradation and is not a pure simulacrum but a shadow that ‘casts off’ evidence of life beyond its exterior. 4 This tension between skin as both a site of the abject and boundary questions the indexical relation and status of separation to the signified. Neville Wakefield refers to this separation as a ‘'space of release,’' a gap that is ‘'heavily impregnated with memory,’' where lived encounters are just as suggestive with corporeal memory as with mental connections. 5
Abigayle McLean
Synecdoche
Latex mounted in perspex display cases, 150cm x 150cm x 150 cm
Synecdoche
Latex mounted in perspex display cases, 150cm x 150cm x 150 cm
Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Reaktion Books Ltd. London,2004) 31
Jay Prosser, Skin Memories: Thinking Through the Skin edited by Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, (Routledge, London, 2001) 52
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (Vintage, London, 2000) 85
“Art Term: Abject Art,” Tate, accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abject-art
Neville Wakefield, Separation Anxiety and the Art of Release, (Parkett, 42, 1994, 77-78)