THE FABRIC OF LIFE

We poke at it, prod it, shape it by exercise and weight. We enhance it, alter, decorate it and reshape it. SKIN, the major surface of our bodies, has become a fabric, a marketing tool and object of desire.

My art posed between the traditional nude and deconstructed being strips the canvas (the skin of painting) from its supports and transforms it into draped pieces of skin coloured fabric ( using light calico and oil paints). In the installation Cyberspace/reality, the skin like objects appended to fabric address the Kantian format of the "beautiful" vs. the "sublime" but at the same moment address masculine concepts of women as the object of desire and they themselves being abject figures in the dance of life. It deconstructs the feminist power structure construct and posits the question whether the pursuit of the object of desire does not place the ultimate power in the object pursued.

My fascination with skin surfaces began while working as a surgeon and realizing that once the theatre drapes were placed on the body- gender, race, religion, body shape... no longer existed. I was solely dealing with a fabric that covered the internal organs. This concept was furthered by the reading of Jean Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. It was from these authors that I gleaned the concept that no matter whom the person we view is we construct a reality about them based on no factual information. We are amorphous beings that assign realities to those we see.