Sketches for Body Abstractions / Deviant Anatomies (works in progress)
A series of films experimenting with the human form, exploring our relationship to and dislocation from the body.
The ongoing series of short films take the body as a starting point, using varied techniques to fragment, splice and manipulate the subject’s flesh into abstract patterns and movements. These pieces investigate the dislocation and displacement of human physical form within the hyperconnected world, where appearance is key and surveillance and policing of the body is almost constant. These mutable forms depict the body fusing with space (the cellular to the landscape and the global), other bodies, and its own grotesque corporeal physicality with shifting, deviant physical boundaries.
The series creates abstracted nude figurative portraits blended and spliced together, animated into chimerical creatures. Deviant anatomies are an expression of anxiety in times of upheaval and fluctuating boundaries, for example, the industrial revolution producing gothic horrors like Frankenstein. As well as a social influence, it resonates with my experience of chronic joint pain (Ankylosing Spondylitis), and an accompanying view of reality that is fragmented, dis-located, dis-placed, disjointed, inhabiting many spheres, physically anchored in a space by my nerve endings and trapped by the limits of the body while seeking to transcend the reality of the situation, living with a corrupted sense of self.
This series of films creates transgressions between the binaries of natural and artificial, conceptually interrogating the boundary between subject and the world, which does not coincide with the limits of the body. In doing so, it plays with the fragile border between self and other to discover new forms, a different energy, finding beauty in distortion and vitality in the grotesque. In creating intimacy at the same time as othering the subjects, the films create multiplicity and polyforms that convey the shifting of bodily territorial borders and identity.
