Myriad
I see the body’s interior as a world alive with visual references that can be linked to other
natural forms and organisms. In the process of making work I peel away the skin to expose
the hidden landscapes of life that mirror themselves throughout nature. I see the human
body as belonging to both a microcosmic and macrocosmic universe.
I use various materials: wax, resin, latex, fluids and especially glass, which I perceive as a
metaphor for a membrane, as a fragile yet robust skin that allows light to pass through and
reveal the hidden interior and which, like life, is never static.
My source material has always been natural organisms and images of the body: two
dimensional medical and historical works and the three dimensional wonders found in
anatomical museums. The presentations and apparatus of discovery also hold a particular
fascination.
With ‘Myriad’, the viewer is confronted with a curtain made up of acrylic lenses of differing
focal lengths, attached together, and hung from a stainless steel suspension pole in an ‘S’ shape.
In Myriad, the act of seeing is intensified, as if through a microscope. The human image is
distorted and broken up, questioning what is reality; for some, a particular lens will magnify
an object and for others the same lens will blur that object. Details will be revealed, not
seen at first glance and so requiring the viewer to examine what is in front of them more
closely.
Some of the lenses have the sight markings still on them, written in Opticians code,
knowledge that only they can understand, and all those not educate and in that language
will remain isolated and in the dark as to its meaning. An inability to read information
through visual or educational problems denies asses to other worlds. |
