Artist Statement

 

2020

 

 

This body of work uses psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud’s ego, Didier Anzieu’s skin ego and Stella North’s clothing-ego as a lens to investigate the relationship between psyche, skin and cloth. In considering my own body as a site of abjection, I explore past events which have shaped my own experience of embodiment through physical and psychical trauma. The connection between internal and external hurts challenge my own sense of self identity in the face of constant abjection.

 

The relationship between psyche and skin is constant interchange of cause and effect on one another. Psychological trauma and stress manifests on the skins surface as disease and depigmentation. External traumas from relationships, childhood, birthing, medical injury, skin disease and scars cause psychological distress. While the two go around like a Mobius strip of disorder, the development of a thick skin interjects as a mechanism to cope.

 

Skin itself becomes a site of both beauty and abjection and elicits responses of both attraction and disgust. It is a site of decay, of ageing, trauma, disease and degeneration. It is a boarder between self and the world, a vessel which contains abject fluids, and which those fluids breach. We find proportion and harmony in skin. Contemporary focus on skin and beauty has brought about the notion that skin is changeable. It can be customised, cut and stitched to adjust, treated like cloth. Skin and cloth hold intimate knowledge of one another. We are wrapped in cloth from birth to death, we sleep in it, we bathe with it, it protects us, hides us and forms to our shape. Cloth becomes a supplementary skin, hiding the abject skin. Cloth forms part of our external identity through what we choose to wear. We project and internal sense of self onto the surface of the skin to form our self identity.

 

Historical fascinations with anatomy as a spectacle have informed my use of wax as a medium. Bodies and examples of skin disease were sculpted from wax in the 18th century due to its ability to represent the flesh. In this work, wax substitutes skin to become intermeshed with cloth. Like skin, wax flakes, cracks, wrinkles, protects and forms as skin as it solidifies. Cloth is the other predominant medium which brings with it connotations of comfort and safety in the home space while I bring to the surface personal traumas.

 

The focus on self in this body of work developed through a need to evaluate my identity in the face of traumas, to understand as a way of releasing the past. I am challenged by the qualities of my skin and identity and though this work seek to reframe my self-image.