| culturalterrain.com > gallery > the skins series > artist's statement |
| . . . for me ideology is a kind of vast membrane enveloping everything. We have to know that this skin exists even if it encloses us like a net or like closed eyelids. —Hélène Cixous |
| My subject is skin: flexible and emotive, superficial but essential, protective but vulnerable. A boundary. A border. A membrane. An organ. A commodity. A pelt. In this on-going series of work, I am exploring how expectation, desire and convention—our own and others—form casings which shape our deepest selves and which become so familiar they seem like our own skin. My skins are physical, emotional, cultural. Their fabric is a social structure as well as a textile, and their fabrication requires translation and invention as well as construction. My skins are garments—not clothing for the body, but clothing as the body. They costume and camouflage the self, conceal and reveal identity, contain and control sexuality, embody states of longing and desire. They can be put on, worn, taken off, discarded. Like biological skins, these skins are permeable. They can be unzipped, unbuttoned, rattled or read, and I invite the viewer’s explorations. All the skins are made from the same pattern. This pattern, 44 pieces, was shaped from stiff tarlatan by feeling or remembering the distance on my body from clavicle to pelvis, from knee to ankle, making a dart, then another, adding on a piece to get the girth. The resulting form, made without measuring, is almost exactly to my dimensions. These skins are constructed with dressmaking techniques—darts, gussets, tucks and gathers—and their openings fasten with snaps and zippers. Although accurately sized and scaled, their decorativeness—the shape of the throat, the way the breasts and knee caps are appliquéd, how the hands and ears are suggested by quilting—comes from conventions of sewing, not anatomy. They are made with painstaking care. The material is lined, cut, overcast, basted, sewn, turned inside out, sewn again, trimmed, clipped, gathered, smoothed and shaped. How they are made speaks of labor and tending and the tension in domesticity between devotion and exploitation. As skins, they can be put on, worn, taken off, discarded. Although empty, they hold their shape. Their form comes from the weight and grain of the fabric and the way they are seamed. Their gesture is one of both resignation and recognition—not just passivity, but comprehension. There is an on-going dialogue in this work between my writing and my visual art, and the handwritten text embedded in deposition is my narrative poem, the Sea of Cortez—the monologue of a woman who, having never spoken a genuine desire, buries her propriety and expectation in the desert and digs up her own skin. This series began with my writing about a woman who tires of needlepointing pillows and who begins, while her husband and children are asleep, to needlepoint a woman "from the inside out" (needlepoint). She is stitching herself, trying to find her form, making herself up as she goes along. Her stitching, like mine, is inquiry, investigation, meditation—a translation of the information encoded in her body. This first work in the series, map (a needlepoint woman) is still in progress. I expect that when I have finished the needlepoint woman, which will require 72,000 stitches to complete, I will have reached the end of this series of work. |
| Elizabeth Ingraham A list of the poems which accompany the skins series: |