«O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!»
From: Robert Burns - To a louse - 1786
To see oursels as ithers see us!»
From: Robert Burns - To a louse - 1786
In 2019, playwright Jean-Philippe Raymond approached me to work together on a project combining theater and visual arts on the subject of how one can, at times, feel invisible. The Covid crisis put pay to the theatrical project, but the conversations and residencies done in that context triggered a new cycle in my work. . To try to answer the question of how to translate in a visual medium the individual feeling of being invisible, I thought of tattoos. The question is that since our skin is our ultimate visual interface, by altering that interface, could we be trying to make it’s initial form invisible? After talking about this idea with my acquaintances and friends, word of mouth started bringing perfect strangers to my studio to pose. From this experience came the series «Skins» which, going beyond the initial idea, became a means of addressing wider issues, such as the representation of our memory of a fleeting presence or the desire to take control of the narrative of how we should be percieved.
All portraits are life size.
Acrylic and photo transfers (ink and acrylic binder) on peeled paper (The work is done on 350g paper and when it is finished, the paper is turned over and as much of the paper as possible, is peeled off, so that, in the end, there is hardly any paper left).
2021 / 2022
