The following is a transcript from my floor talk

“I’ve been thinking of the body’s skin as a seal for holding stories, using thick skins of paint to create human skins that are shedded and reformed, broken and resealed. With distance, these abstract slicks of paint, become skins - for wrapping the tender emotional, spiritual and physical experiences of the body.

The work grew out of thinking about the energetic and spiritual nature of gender transition - as a kind of ecdyses (a term usually used to refer to skin shedding in reptiles). Popular discourse around trans people often fixates on assumed aspects of our physical experience, and tends to either mock or fetishise our bodies based on how we appear to others. Here I’m trying to shift the gaze off just our physicality (but by going ‘through’ the skin, and the skin of the paint), hopefully inviting a wider reflection about the otherworldly nature of transitions.

 Medicinal Skins is a reference to transformation and healing, a reflection on how those words (transformation and healing) sound soft, but how those processes are usually kind of brutal. They require some kind of breaking down. And, that’s how the magic happens.

 The titles all refer to some kind of transition or shape shifting. Humans changing form is ancient. Greif changes us. Love changes us. When people die or are born, we are changed. Gender transition is one contemporary, and ancient, expression of this magic but it sits inside a much wider practice of shape changing, loss, bliss and transformation - that we all have some embodied knowledge about.

 In cutting and spreading paint with knives, I’ve been able to explore the tactile relationship of human skins and paint skins, charging the marks with my own sensations of ‘changing skins’ and living between worlds. The works are titled to invoke the magic of these in-between-spaces, with names like ‘selkie’ who were shape shifters in Celtic tradition, moving between human and seal bodies; and ‘solstice’ referencing  another type of transition or shifting in between time.

 Up close, most of the paintings abstract completely, like when we are close to change. Disruption, confusion, abstraction, movement - that transitional space where there is no map, no form to hold onto, no logic, and our only way to be present is just that. It’s not until we have distance that the form develops or we can understand the past. This is the dance forward and back, toward and away from the paintings.

It’s the same process in the studio. I try to paint at that meeting place between absolute discipline and absolute looseness, but, I inevitably have to over-paint and destroy the work before it will meet me. The painting process feels deeply collaborative - I do half the painting and the painting does the other half. It’s that dance of trying to meet somewhere we can both agree on.

These paintings shift simultaneously towards and away from both the body, and abstraction – and I think somewhere in there is the point, the medicine maybe”.

Below is a selection of works from this exhibition