ARTIST'S STATEMENT

 The work aims to explore through the body, through the physical boundaries of the body, other limits personal, cultural and psychological. “The body is the site at which the social and biological/psychological meet. It is not a natural ‘given’, but a constructed web of meanings and subject positions.” (Marsha Meskimmon - Make Magazine).

The work uses the body as a visceral theatre playing out impossible realities and scenarios with the camera as its artificial eye. Playing on the notion of the camera as ‘evidence’ many of the images have a medical or forensic appearance. As in ‘Whole I & II’ which resemble medical before and after photographs, an opening or orifice is located at the base of the spine the cause of this orifice is unknown and the image unsettling. Unsettling because the body is less than ‘whole’ with its surface ruptured it is now a disruptive, unstable body. The skin becomes a metaphor, a boundary between the internal and external, the orifice becomes an “.... encounter with a void of signification.” (Griselda Pollock).

Kristeva asks the question in powers of horror “How can I be without border?” Implying that we construct our self-knowledge through the knowledge of others and our environment through limits and perimeters. To transgress these borders is to cause abjection and rejection within a social system, to become the other the outsider the abnormal. The forming of our identity is bound with our physical body and all are subject to social construction. As Chris Townsed suggests in Vile Bodies “We do not want to see inside ourselves for to see that is to erase our self.” We become faceless and with out a fixed identity.

“La Specula” is the title of a series of photographs produced using destroying mirrors; it is also concerned with the construction of the self. The face of the sitter has melted to a liquid consistency and although frozen in the photographic still, it gives the appearance it has caught a body in a act of metamorphoses.

“La Specula” meaning the observatory originally came from the Latin word for mirror and these pictures draw heavily on the psychoanalytical mirror of Irigaray and her book ‘Speculum’ (the speculum being a mirror used during medical examinations to view the interior of the body. It is used as a. metaphor to appose Lacan’s ‘mirror theory’, which places identity formation as an exterior event.)

Like much of the work these mirrored photographs become a spectacle and like the spectacle it can have multiple readings. The spectacle can be both the outsider, the oddity, the other or it can be wondrous and to marvel at, being simultaneously “sacred and sacrificial” (Daina Augaitis). For these very reasons the body or the abject body is valuable in its ability to challenge knowledge systems that claim impartiality or the truth.

Artists such as Susan Hiller, Helen Chadwick, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney to name a few have also used the body to this effect, however the use of the bizarre and uncanny has a long and historical background. From Hieronymus Bosch to Goya it has been the cause of both fascination and aberration. The embodiments of beliefs and ideas have been projected onto the physical body in disciplines as disparate as medicine and science to religion and philosophy. The work itself is a hybrid, an anonymity drawing from these many differing sources.

The images attempt to reside in those ambiguous areas between binaries where by the viewer is both seduced and repulsed, both intrigued and appalled, both believing and disbelieving the images presented.

“We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity” (Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror)