In One’s Skin

In One’s Skin

2016

banana fibre paper, raw banana pulp plaster, wax, coffee.

The work is a series of female figures, created out of full body plaster moulds cast from my own body, and then moulded in hand-made banana fibre paper.

The work views the world through my political lens. It seems that our humanity is being saturated and diluted by commodity and noise. I feel that pieces of me continually die, as I am forced to shed my beliefs and connect to my own vulnerability and humanity, as my understanding of myself and my place in the contemporary world shifts and changes.

The work suggests that only in contemplation can we consider our own view of what is it to be human. In the process of creating this work, I found myself in an unravelling, a free fall, lost in uncertainty with nothing left to hold onto, where the material and the process of making art led the way. The figures’ pain is absolutely visceral, representing a shedding of one’s skin, and a series of lived moments and shifting perceptions.

I have isolated that feeling of pain, pushing both my physical body and the boundaries of the material. I have created a dramatic theatre that confronts the viewer. Its strength lies in the figures’ ability to activate and encompass a multiplicity of interpretations.

It is my hope the figures may be read as archetypes of human suffering, stripped from their personal and cultural contexts. I hope they will be read as confronting symbols of social breakdown, or psychological fixations.