Skin as a site or sight for memory is the key concept that informs my practice in which I question the following: How does our approach to observing the skin have significance on the way we represent ourselves and others in portraiture and contemporary visual culture? How can skin as a medium and archive be analyzed and documented to inform how we communicate and experience embodiment? Engaging with individuals and the marks on their skin, I make work through a collaborative process that examines ideas of representation, trauma, and authenticity. Through the use of analogue photography and video installations, I aim to foster a singularized experience through materiality by disidentifying with other reproducible digital forms. Focusing on the epidermal likeness and anonymity of the subject, I use ‘skin portraiture’ as a method to disrupt traditional portraiture, and in turn also act as a form of protection for the individuals involved.
Amy Kathryn Watson in Complexion: Skin, Surface and Depth in Contemporary Art Practice, presents her interpretation of skin’s role as “a medium of passage, interchange and the vehicle in which our other senses are embedded.” 1 Watson employs a phenomenological approach of unpacking skin as a medium, material and metaphor by rationalizing with and through the skin. “Thinking through the skin is a thinking that attends not only to the sensuality of being-with-others, but also to the ethical implications of the impossibility of inhabiting the other’s skin.”2 Applying this phenomenological lens as a strategy to inform my process of making and thinking is vital to understanding the physiological components of skin and what it is to inhabit one.
Thinking through the skin is a thinking that attends not only to the sensuality of being-with-others, but also to the ethical implications of the impossibility of inhabiting the other’s skin. “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 our inheritance is there to be read by others. It is where the world confronts the I and the I meets the world.”3 Mundi suggests that meaning is ascribed to the skin, and the skin is further opened to being read and interpreted. Skin has the ability to act as a “soft clock”4 highlighting Steven Connors sentiment that skin is an autobiographical record. Guiding our representations of skin, skin metaphors are a part of a language, which in turn shape and reinforce our relations with our own skins and those of others.
Documenting these traces on individuals' skins and utilizing skin portraiture as a method is integral to accentuating these signifiers or memory tethers. Through the magnification, fragmentation and anatomization of the epidermis, this abstraction of the body through skin portraiture makes the subject anonymous, only identifiable by the differentiating marks present on these skinscapes. “Skin portraiture highlights how our outermost edge communicates the vicissitudes of embodiment across bodies.”5 This technique makes me consider skin as a mediator and filter that is able to convey embodiment. In turn this also makes me question how the autonomy of the portrait and body through skin portraiture disrupts the boundaries between the object and subject. By combining a phenomenological approach with the use of skin portraiture as a technique, I intend to open up the testimonies documented to a comparative manifestation when witnessed.
References:
1. Watson, Amy Kathryn, ‘'Complexion: Skin, Surface and Depth in Contempoary Art Practice.’' (PhD diss.., University of the Witwatersrand, 2010), 9.
2. Sarah Ahmed, Jackie Stacey, Thinking Through the Skin (New York: Routledge, 2001), 7.
3. Veronica Mundi in, Heide Hatry: Skin, ed. Heide Hatry (Berlin:Heidleberg, 2006), 22 .
4. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004) 46.
5. Heidi Kellet, “Skin Portraiture: Relational Embodiment and Contemporary Art,” in Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone, eds. Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2015) 1