SKIN AND THE SUPPLE BOUNDARIES OF SELF
Skin has a curious relationship to the self. In her book, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, Claudia Benthien argues that we have tended to understand the self historically as both in the skin and as the skin.1 The notion of the skin as a container for the authentic self—as a boundary between the outside world and the person within—sits alongside discourses that equate the skin with the subject whereby the skin is read as a metonym for the whole person. The result is a paradoxical arrangement in which the skin is theorised simultaneously as the self and other to the self.
These paradoxical and malleable relations between the skin and the self deeply inform the work of the Melbourne photographer, Peta Clancy. This Skin I’m In, 2002, Clancy’s installation at the Australian Centre for Photography, contrasts images of parts of Clancy’s face with small, hand-stitched pillows printed with enlarged photographs of flakes of skin that have been removed from the artist’s body. The juxtaposition of fine, pale pink prints of Clancy’s face with irregularly clustered images of peeled skin questions the point at which the skin ceases to be a part of the self and becomes abject and other.
Clancy’s current, ongoing series of photographs, ‘she carries it all like a map on her skin’, develops these earlier investigations into the relationships between skin and the self by focusing on the delicate skin of the eyelids and lips. The close cropping of these photographs denies us a full view of the face through which we would normally seek to determine the person’s identity, but at the same time fosters a certain intimacy with the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline