Heidi Kellet, examines the impact of “skin portraiture” on traditional notions of portraiture in contemporary visual culture in her essay Skin Portraiture: Relational Embodiment and Contemporary Art. Skin portraiture is a sub-genre of portraiture that Kellet developed, which focuses on the epidermal likeness of the subject, that in turn disrupts conventional portraiture by removing the referent of facial features. Kellet notes, that “when the epidermis is fragmented, magnified, and anatomized in this way the barriers of likeness that tend to distance the represented subject from the viewer are dissolved.” [1] Therefore skin portraiture has the ability to conduct an encounter of bodies. Through the disruption of the boundary present between observer and the portrait, this method challenges both the autonomy of the portrait and body, allowing an intimate engagement through relation. This language makes the representation of the skin precedent which is one of the main concerns of within my own practice.
1. 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) 5