• Knifing Skin

    Date posted: November 2, 2010 Author: jolanta
    The first skin drawing was of a small pair of folded hands that I dotted onto my thigh. At the time, I was working on a series of fabric drawings and out of mild curiosity, decided to transfer a drawing onto myself instead of the fabric. This very innocent studio distraction continued until the drawings on my body became too elaborate and interesting to wash away without documenting them. It was through photography that I first saw the possibility of the skin drawings as a series. I stopped thinking of them just as performances, and started to see them as lines interacting in a two-dimensional space. In the beginning I searched for large areas (back, stomach, or thighs): some passage of my skin that could function as a flat, uninterrupted surface. 

    Lynn Palewicz

    Lynn Palewicz, Knife, 2005. C-Print, ink on skin, 26 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

    The first skin drawing was of a small pair of folded hands that I dotted onto my thigh. At the time, I was working on a series of fabric drawings and out of mild curiosity, decided to transfer a drawing onto myself instead of the fabric. This very innocent studio distraction continued until the drawings on my body became too elaborate and interesting to wash away without documenting them. It was through photography that I first saw the possibility of the skin drawings as a series. I stopped thinking of them just as performances, and started to see them as lines interacting in a two-dimensional space.

    In the beginning I searched for large areas (back, stomach, or thighs): some passage of my skin that could function as a flat, uninterrupted surface. When that ran dry, I began looking for ways to add more skin to the frame, pushing arms and legs together. This quickly gave way to objects on different body parts interacting with my skin such as in Knife, where my hand becomes the tool that cuts and separates my legs. Raking was the first of the skin drawings to include scratched lines. Thinking of drawing as mark making allowed for controlled lines that I could ink onto my skin, as well as colorful marks (equally controlled and planned) that I could pinch and scratch into my skin. I wanted these two mark-making systems to work together to make the hand-drawn objects look capable of causing trauma to skin. Overtime, the goal became to balance the level of draftsmanship that I brought to the drawings, the sexuality inherent in the female form, and the trauma of the marked flesh. Keeping these elements proportionate to one another heightened the tension in the work, allowing for wider interpretations.

    Since the Skin Drawings series, I have continued to combine photography and sculpture, expanding the scope of my exploration of self-portraiture to include time and scale. In my current work, I photograph myself interacting with different versions of my body including a small, hand-sculpted replica of my torso (The Torso Series) and a life-size, hand-made model of my child self (The Girl Photos). At the root of all the work is a desire to represent my body without limiting myself to any one material or any one way of portraying it.

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