Outwardly referencing Yves Klein's anthropometries, the project "Rumour, Humour and Bodies of Thought" was created in collaboration with artist Mairead McVeigh as an exploration of social attitudes.
It was a site specific or perhaps more accurately a group specific work.
Notwithstanding its visual impact, it relied primarily upon the intrigue caused within an art group by the mysterious appearance of the images and the unknown identities of either the subjects and/or the perpetrators.
Consisting of two large panels, one obviously female and the other male, the images appeared anonymously and secretively on opposite sides of the project space. They had been created by the artists covering themselves in blue paint, pressing themselves against the paper which had not only registered the intimate presence of their living, naked bodies, but had also captured a transitory moment in time and space.
With no associated information regarding the project, the mysterious debut of the piece created an air of intrigue. Initially the work seemed to embrace the human figure as its primary subject, but its situation and the undoubted premise that it must have been produced by someone within the group, created a 'particular' interest. The nature of the work not only invited viewers to wonder who created it, but to also wonder just who it was they might be looking at. There is a distinction between creator and subject and the order in which these questions may have arisen is possibly significant. That there would be a distinction indicates that the piece would have revealed various levels of sociological, artistic, unconscious and conscious cognitive engagement.
Body prints present an uncertainty of categories, being simultaneously abstract and representational, and generate a confusion of response. Unlike the photographer who, given the space between the camera and the subject, offers the viewer a safe distancing between themselves and the subject, body prints afford no such security: they are up close and personal. They are life size, touchable, and offer a visceral re-presentation of the human figure in real space. Like a photograph, a body print captures the 'immediate', however a body print is not only a capturing of but, significantly, is the mark of the immediate. The physicality of the process, the differing pressures and weights of the naked painted bodies as applied to the substrate, pushes and presses a single colour producing a tonal range that appears almost three dimensional. It is a process that leaves intimate and detailed traces of everything that makes contact with the surface. With such personal physical contact there is also the suggestion of the transfer of perspiration, skin cells and hair.
In Rumour, Humour and Bodies of Thought every mark seen was the result of the touch our naked human bodies against the paper.
Every day, through advertising, fashion, TV, film and in Art Galleries we are presented with images of partially, if not completely, naked fellow human beings; in the main, images to which we are becoming increasingly habituated and immune. The impactful pictorial presence of the artist's anonymous naked figures in this project and the group's curiosity and wish to know their identities highlighted the ironies, contradictions and conflictions of the naked human form in our culture, questioning the difference between the anodyne, explicit imagery of our consumer driven society and similar imagery of people with whom we have personal, everyday contact?
Intimacy was experienced within the project by the viewer and Maddie and myself as artists, but it was also as much about us as its subjects, our thoughts approaching the process and our perceptions of how we might be viewed as it was about the responses experienced by the viewers of our work.
'Bodies of Thought' explored cultural attitudes towards issues such as nudity, gender, shape, body anxiety, self esteem , sexual preferences, ethnicity, age, etc. It offered us as artists and participants as well as those who viewed it the opportunity to identify the mental processes of which we are not normally aware yet affect what we think and do - the implicit unconscious thoughts that cause stereotyping, discrimination, bias and prejudice in society.
Our identities were puzzled over, surmised by some but when eventually revealed to the group there remained a question regarding the particular transitory moment in time and space when the images were made . . . no one ever asked.
It was a site specific or perhaps more accurately a group specific work.
Notwithstanding its visual impact, it relied primarily upon the intrigue caused within an art group by the mysterious appearance of the images and the unknown identities of either the subjects and/or the perpetrators.
Consisting of two large panels, one obviously female and the other male, the images appeared anonymously and secretively on opposite sides of the project space. They had been created by the artists covering themselves in blue paint, pressing themselves against the paper which had not only registered the intimate presence of their living, naked bodies, but had also captured a transitory moment in time and space.
With no associated information regarding the project, the mysterious debut of the piece created an air of intrigue. Initially the work seemed to embrace the human figure as its primary subject, but its situation and the undoubted premise that it must have been produced by someone within the group, created a 'particular' interest. The nature of the work not only invited viewers to wonder who created it, but to also wonder just who it was they might be looking at. There is a distinction between creator and subject and the order in which these questions may have arisen is possibly significant. That there would be a distinction indicates that the piece would have revealed various levels of sociological, artistic, unconscious and conscious cognitive engagement.
Body prints present an uncertainty of categories, being simultaneously abstract and representational, and generate a confusion of response. Unlike the photographer who, given the space between the camera and the subject, offers the viewer a safe distancing between themselves and the subject, body prints afford no such security: they are up close and personal. They are life size, touchable, and offer a visceral re-presentation of the human figure in real space. Like a photograph, a body print captures the 'immediate', however a body print is not only a capturing of but, significantly, is the mark of the immediate. The physicality of the process, the differing pressures and weights of the naked painted bodies as applied to the substrate, pushes and presses a single colour producing a tonal range that appears almost three dimensional. It is a process that leaves intimate and detailed traces of everything that makes contact with the surface. With such personal physical contact there is also the suggestion of the transfer of perspiration, skin cells and hair.
In Rumour, Humour and Bodies of Thought every mark seen was the result of the touch our naked human bodies against the paper.
Every day, through advertising, fashion, TV, film and in Art Galleries we are presented with images of partially, if not completely, naked fellow human beings; in the main, images to which we are becoming increasingly habituated and immune. The impactful pictorial presence of the artist's anonymous naked figures in this project and the group's curiosity and wish to know their identities highlighted the ironies, contradictions and conflictions of the naked human form in our culture, questioning the difference between the anodyne, explicit imagery of our consumer driven society and similar imagery of people with whom we have personal, everyday contact?
Intimacy was experienced within the project by the viewer and Maddie and myself as artists, but it was also as much about us as its subjects, our thoughts approaching the process and our perceptions of how we might be viewed as it was about the responses experienced by the viewers of our work.
'Bodies of Thought' explored cultural attitudes towards issues such as nudity, gender, shape, body anxiety, self esteem , sexual preferences, ethnicity, age, etc. It offered us as artists and participants as well as those who viewed it the opportunity to identify the mental processes of which we are not normally aware yet affect what we think and do - the implicit unconscious thoughts that cause stereotyping, discrimination, bias and prejudice in society.
Our identities were puzzled over, surmised by some but when eventually revealed to the group there remained a question regarding the particular transitory moment in time and space when the images were made . . . no one ever asked.