the body as a site for cultural representation

some images of my project hung up in the studio.

looking at the other side of the fabric - drawn on side

the patches of fabric before I stitched them together

one and other

Anthony Gormley's project "One and Other" for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square this summer.

For 100 days, every hour (applicants chosen randomly though also representational of the geographic of UK) a different person will stand on the plinth creating a "monument built in time out of 1 hours of people's lives".

liked this article

Assaulting the Surface
A Conversation with Sarah Lovitt
by Ana Finel Honigman

skin/clothes/marks etc

list of links and notes:

Human skin is the largest organ of the integumentary system made up of multiple layers of epithelial tissues that guard underlying muscles and organs. As the interface with the surroundings, skin plays the most important role in protecting.

microscopy images

national geographic photo gallery

 

penn museum of archaeology and anthropology  online exhibits 

human skin- binding book

"FACTOIDS:

• As an adult, you may have more than 20 square feet of skin -- about the size of a blanket.
• You are likely to shed some 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime"

^^^ taken from "Your Gross and Cool Body"

wikipedia on skin

clothes- distressed and repaired showing their history etc and current economic climate "make do and mend"

wikipedia clothing and clothing maintenance

anna deavere smith

Anna Deavere Smith 

An actress, writer and playwright from Baltimore. She has been doing a project since the late 1970s called "On the Road a Search for American Character". This has involved recording conversations with over 2,000 people which she then re-enacts generally without props or costumes. The aim was to "absorb America". She is able to embody the character regardless of their age, race, gender etc. 

I like the idea of using scripts from conversations or interviews and reconsidering them out of their original context. Might experiment with film or sound of Katie and I- identity, compare/contrast, mirror, repeating, expectations etc...

Timecode at DCA Dundee

This weekend I went to the Timecode exhibition at the DCA, Dundee. Since it's the DCA's 10th anniversary year the work was all linked with the theme of time passing.

There was a really interesting sound piece from Kelly Mark titled "I really should" which was a spoken stream of consciousness where Mark listed things such as "I really should check my blood pressure... I really should go and see the world... I really should have used primer... I really should join the going trend. I really should celebrate my uniqueness." This list had originally been a film but was translated to a written piece on a fridge and now as this sound piece. 

Another interesting piece was Beacon by John Thomson and Alison Craighead using a mechanical railway flap sign to display internet searches someone somewhere is making at that moment in time. Every few minutes the public information sign changes acting like an "endless piece of concrete poetry; the authors of each line of text remain totally anonymous, whilst the viewer experiences a random stream of information that indicates current interests and preoccupations."  Reading each line as it appears gives you a real curiosity for who was searching, why they were and what results they read etc. 

the twin thing

the body as a site of cultural representation 

I had a look at The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century so that directed a lot of my thoughts towards considering the body as object and objectification of the female body. 

I was also reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which is really interesting in its discussion of a fictitious future society where people are conditioned to fulfill certain roles in society. "Community, identity, stability" 

Stemming from ideas around Henry Ford's mass production this society uses the Bokanovsky Process (cloning) to produce "ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines". 

me and Katie

The recurring images surrounding twins and identity were particularly relevant to me as an identical twin. 

(The Savage's description of scenes at the hospital, pg 185)

"Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came - a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face - for there was only one between the lot of them -...the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed between the beds, climbed over, crawled under..."

"High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors."

Am I an I or a We?

e-how "How to Find Your Identity Despite Being a Twin"

Article about twins and identity-young age