A Knowing Body 2018
Materials: Mixed media with vinyl wall text, powder coated steel, cast polyurethane, wax, bronze leaf.
Dimensions Variable
Part of Lucian’s Neighbours, 06 April – 27 May 2018, Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Images courtesy of IMMA, Photos: Ros Kavanagh.
Physical sketches referencing the prosthetic, the disability aid, the blister pack – created as part of a research project entitled A Knowing Body 2018.
Developed as part of the Freud Project residency at IMMA, this collaborative conversation with writer Sue Rainsford incorporated object, text and sound towards experimental research which pivots around Lucian Freud's assertion 'I want the paint to feel like flesh'. Referencing anthropology, psychoanalysis, trans and gender theory, the work attempted to consider the materiality of flesh and its myriad resonances.
Drawing on the writings of Paul B. Preciado and Suely Rolnik in considering contemporary interpretations of flesh, the research focused upon key accounts of how bodies are made visible and invisible, problematising our understanding of flesh, and ultimately highlighting what Rolnik has termed the anaesthesia of the knowing body.
The research was furthered through experimental and performative responses (combining text, acoustics, image and object),generating a 'visceral-scape' or expanded narrative (engaging the technical expertise of a Foley artist),through a series of choreographed actions. Exploiting the simultaneous ambiguity and familiarity of a specifically engineered glossary of sounds - body, prop and prosthetic allowed for physical and somatic disruption within the viewer.
