'Skin is a liminal structure, it is in-between, it is the template on which our experience, inner and outer, is inscribed, and our experience and inheritance, is there to be read by others.''1
I am interested in investigating how the materiality of skin correlates as a vessel for memory. Through my research investigation and studio practice I will explore what forms of visual imagery are most effective in documenting, transferring and constructing these traces to the ''inframince space'', a ''liminal space at which both the fact of the object and its representation, imaginings and associations overlay one another.".2
In my previous works such as 'Graft' (fig.1) , 'C701 Document'(fig. 2) and 'C701_3' (fig. 3 and 4) series, I have scratched the surface in my exploration of skin as a form of archive in relation to memory through its surface.
Figure 1. Abigayle McLean, Graft, 2015.
The formal qualities of 'Graft', such as the zip-lock bags and translucent nature of the impasto photographic lifts, operate as a membrane, encasing the residue of other existing entities. Like skin, these bags are agents of preservation, holding the contents of the body together.
Figure 2. Abigayle McLean, C701 Document, 2016
The use of containment is a recurring protection structure in my work also seen in the 'C701 Document' series. Preservation of these fragments is vital to giving the subject a history or illusion of it. Each collage is treated as a specimen, pinned down by pieces of sellotape against the light box. Evidence of the maker is not hidden, fingerprints and debris from the studio contaminates the skin samples.
This haphazard archive and tampering of the maker reiterates the vulnerabilities of memory; even though they are compartmentalized and stored, these vessels are not made to last, mirroring our own mortality. My process consists of using materials that are mundane and not archival with the intention of inducing a sense of a slow and layered decay of flesh and matter. This deterioration is also reflected in the use of fragmented cropping, detaching the viewer from the original context of the subject photographed. The skin depicted becomes a landscape, abstracted and limited to infection of false narratives derived from the viewer's interpretation.
Figure 3. Abigayle McLean, C701_1, 2016
Figure 4. Abigayle McLean, C701_2, 2016
Notes:
1. Michael J. Amy, Hans Gercke, and Heinz Norbert Jocks, Skin (Berlin: Heidleberg, 2006), 22.
2. Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I.B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007), 31.