Skin

The concept of skin always fascinated me. The skin is that porous membrane that works like an interface between external and internal world. It is there as a protector and a container, but equally, skin is like a sponge that swallows everything that present itself.

Although being our barrier, the skin is also a fragile protector; it tears, cracks, opens, burns, wrinkles, peels. But as a counterbalance, skin heals and regenerates itself.

Soft, sleek, hairy, rough, black, white, brow, pink, thick, translucent, skin can take any of these forms. And by doing that, the skin transforms into a storyteller; it indicates us on race, age, health, habits, personality.

When we say we are a society on “appearances” I would almost be tempted of saying that we are a society of “skins”. Simply put, in biological terms, our appearance is our skin. If we were to all be skinned from one day to another, the concept of beauty would crumble and the other would transform into a monstrous reality of our insides. The story we would tell wouldn’t be soft and smooth, but instead bloody and raw, scary.

I single cute and the clearness of the skin is soiled by a red trail of blood, enough to send some people to the ground.

 I have found that a lot of the feminist artists the inspired me, not only use drawings (or prints) as a big element of their practice, but also all use a paper that seems so fragile it could tear, and that have this off white, almost beige colour, just like skin.

Just like thin, fragile skin, strong at the same time, and that tell a story.

Indeed, artists such as Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero abandoned the traditional canvas format because it contained tis very strong male dominated connotation.

Instead they turned toward more “vulnerable”, transparent delicate surfaces, such as handmade papers (e.g Japanese rice paper) or un-stretched fabric, embracing its imperfect borders. 

Latex has this magical characteristic of having a skin colour once dried. Eva Hesse’s work is centered around the quality of materials itself. Extracting and playing with their potentiality, because material can speak for themselves and tell infinite stories.

Hesse’s latex “boxes” are indeed rectangles, forming a bigger rectangle, surely a shape that we do not find in the body. However, the edges re wobbly, instead of being perfectly straight and rigid, and the colour and quality of the material can only make us think of skin. That is what is see when looking at one her pieces.

Although never referencing the body in a straightforward manner, her way of using synthetic materials often has an organic approach. Surfaces are wrinkly, objects are hung loosely, thread are intertwining. Using fiberglass in a lot of her installations, Hesse was informed that it was a material that would change colour with time, and it is something that not only she allowed, but also embraced. Materials change over time, with the aging of its component, the same way the body also ages and deteriorates with time.