Skin prints and human presence/absence within the artwork
- llatham222
- Jan 16
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 28
Detachment from the body
I was struck when I read some quotes by the artist Paul Thek, who said that he created his series of sculptures Technological Relics or 'meat pieces' because of his need to process the 'intransigent stuff' of the human body. In the book 'The Artist's Artist', which records Thek's reflections over his short life, Thek says: ‘I choose this subject-matter because it violates my sensibilities, but thats not the same as shock. I work with it to detach myself from it… its not sex, its flesh, something in a spasm’ (H, Falkenberg. P, Weibel. 2009).
I know, to an extent, that I have a similar fearful dissociation with the body; specifically my own body. As much as I find art-making a necessary part of my life, I feel that I cannot directly tackle this detachment in my work. I have tried, and it seems to pull me up short with all of its associative anxieties; it stalls me. The fulfilment I gain from being an artist is through perhaps using materials as a mediation between myself and my body, or my body and the world.
Phenomenology and Embodied Pedagogy
In Phenomenology, there is an emphasis on understanding ourselves in and through the world. We are not disembodied minds; there is no 'inner self'; we cannot understand ourselves as a subject apart from our body. In this sense, the way we inhabit the world must be through our body; our body oriented within space.
I want the body/my body to be part of my artwork; not explicitly, but I want there to be a presence of the body, an awareness that amongst the things that I am making, there is a connection to the body. When I did my PGCE and trained to be an art teacher, my tutor Tara Page was working on a thesis about 'embodied pedagogy' which focused on learning through our bodily interaction with matter. Her ideas are very important to my personal understanding of art pedagogy, and although I have come to the Masters as an artist, in some ways breaking free of the teaching (for now), I think Embodied and Material Pedagogy is connected to this need for there to be a presence of the body within the work.
These are some contrasting ideas I have been considering:
connected (to the world, to the body)
disconnected (to the world, to the body)
attached
detached
presence
absence
tethered (to the world)
untethered (to the world)
material
immaterial
Body Prints
I imagined hand-hammering a sphere of zinc or copper in two halves, then deeply etching a design into its outer surface, similar to the aluminium block I had created years before. Once etched, I would bond the two halves together to create a hollow etched sphere which would become a printing/press object which could be inked and rolled or pressed onto a surface.
A sphere, because I was once told that I seem to hold emotions and anxieties tightly like a ball, and it felt to be very true, as if those feelings were being stored externally from my body. I am very interested, even fearful, of the mind disconnecting with the body. To me, it is associated with the words listed above.
As I considered the idea, I wanted to see the effect of the aluminium block on my skin, so I pressed all of my body weight into my hand onto the metal relief and then recorded the immediate impressions. The act of doing it felt quite self-punishing and unpleasant. I tried to print my torso area by lying on the metal plate, but I couldn't get enough direct weight or pressure to emboss the skin. Embossed skin looks like branded skin. Though so easy and effective to indent, skin pops back out again like memory foam, and whatever physical trace is gone after a short while.
I created these edits on Photoshop so that I could view the skin prints more as...prints. The colour choice was instinctive but perhaps puts the photographs within the same conversation as some of my other works.
In thinking about Phenomenology and the body in space, I have been considering how the physical world acts as a stabilising, tethering presence. If we feel untethered, absent, disassociated from the world we can reach out and grasp a solid surface or thing. In doing so, we can orient ourselves in relation to the world and we can press down onto it to feel our own weightedness, our push on the world, and feel it pushing back to steady us.
'The Jolt'
Written in 1948, TS Eliot's play The Cocktail Party revolves around a love triangle played out over a dinner party. One of the characters speaks about his wife suddenly disappearing from his life. The character who know only as Uninvited Guest replies:
Eliot's description of 'the jolt' has inspired me since I first read this play. The description of someone walking down stairs and finding 'one step more than your feet expected and you come down with a jolt'. The 'jolt' is realisation that one's body is an object. Our experience is so contained within our own heads that occasionally something happens that reminds us, with a 'jolt', that we are a physical body.
I think the 'jolt' is most uncannily felt when you expect there to be another step and there isn't one. For a second, the ground seems to leap up and we feel like a piece of meat, our proprioception completely thrown.
The artist Paul Thek described the body as 'intransigent' because of its unrelenting, undeniable always-there-ness. I am interested in the phenomenological sense of body orientation and body dis-orientation and how this correlates with inner, mind-experience. To repeat a quote by Paul Thek: ‘I choose this subject-matter because it violates my sensibilities , but that's not the same as shock. I work with it to detach myself from it… its not sex, its flesh, something in a spasm’. Thek's work intentionally confronts the 'intransigent' body in all of its meaty grotesque form because in doing so he is able to 'detach' himself from its horrors and, significantly, the horrors of the Vietnam War.
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