Transfiguration: my 4th year art.

My final fourth year art exhibition, Transfiguration, occurred in Gallery-in-the-Round in Grahamstown in 2009.

In the exhibition catalogue I wrote that "this exhibition centres on processes of change and renewal. Through using the human skin - which is constantly regenerating itself - as a metaphor for personal transformation, the works that make up the exhibition are personal glimpses into very private moments of conversion. The works vary in their tone and approach to the processes of transformation, yet they all allude to the complexity of such a process. Change is not easy and the exhibition reflects this: the sculptures are caught in their own practice of handling change...

Sprouting Figure

...The texture of the silicon has been used to simulate the tactile feel of skin; it is flexible and gives the figures a quality of bodilyness that shifts them from being purely static, impenetrable sculptures to having an element of transience and lifelikeness. The three nooks built into the gallery act as changing rooms and this alludes to the possibility that the viewer, like the sculptures, can renew him/herself too."

The sculptures were made from silicon moulds of my own body (achieved through an extremely traumatic moulding process -for which I thank my Sculpture Girls for their help) and all of them were built up in peeling layers of thin silicon. For this exhibition i created three full figures (one sleeping and two standing) and a rack of hanging silicon skins.

The Sprouting Figure is clothed in flowing nondescript garments and was positioned in front of a mirror, half turned from the initial approach of the viewer. Her arm is lifted but it is only on very close inspection that the viewer sees she is holding a pair of tweezers and is in the process of plucking the sprouts from her peeling face.

Dressing Figure

The Dressing Figure stands poised, dressed in a bath towel and loosely grips a skin hanging from a coat-hanger that she seems to have a distant intention of putting on: of changing into it, replacing her worn skin with a more pristine version. But she is turned away from this pristine skin and instead she seems to be looking at the rack of broken, worn and torn skins across the room.

Rack of Skins

Sleeping Figure
The last figure is the sleeping figure, who is curled up into a foetal position and is entirely naked. With her closed eyes and vulnerable position, she seems self-absorbed in her transformation; the viewer clearly feels they are intruding into her most intimate, private moment.
This Sleeping Figure featured in the Rhodes University Student Exhibition as well as the 2010 ABSA L'Atelier exhibition and catalogue.

And here is a link to an article written while the Sleeping Figure featured in the Rhodes University Student Exhibition: Grocott's Mail (pg. 12)