Artist's Statement - Skin Deep

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"I want to look at lesbian relations and, if possible, all social relations in terms of bodies, energies, movements, inscriptions, rather than in terms of ideologies, the inculcation of ideas, the transmission of systems of representations, modes of socialisation or social reproduction, flattening depth, reducing bodies to surface effects. Sexuality and desire are energies, excitations, impulses, actions, movements, practises, moments, pulses of feeling… always surface effects, between one thing and another."

Elizabeth Grosz. Space, Time and Perversion: the politics of bodies

Artist Statement:

I have become accustomed to reading across the grain of the dominant culture's representations of women, and in my work I grapple with issues of representation and gender in relation to the history of reading the body marked female as "other" and consumptive.

In these images I explore the space between a personal particular and the socially inscribed with my own (con)sensual representations of female, to work against the grain of the dominant cultural viewpoint.

Skin is the libidinous surface upon which all our desires are played out. It is a site from which to explore the ambiguity between the beautiful and the grotesque, the alluring and the repellent, the erotic and the abject. I offer no fixed definitions, only momentary observations.

Kaz Bartsch, September 2003