First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
Skin doesn’t
have roots,
it peels away
easy as paper
Peta Clancy is preoccupied with skin, mortality and ageing.
Her most recent photographic series traces a dermatological
destiny, writes Ingrid Periz. Portrait by Kirstin Gollings.
112
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
M
elbourne-based photographer Peta Clancy uses a quote from Sylvia
Plath when talking about her work: “Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels
away easy as paper.” For Clancy, who often works with photographs of
facial details, Plath’s skin-and-paper comparison mirrors her own practice where
“the surfaces of the skin and the photograph are central.” Detailing wrinkles and
folds, photographing dust, or using bacteria to imagine complete bodies, Clancy
nods to new art forms like BioArt but in a way that touches upon longstanding
philosophical and aesthetic concerns. Her focus on the body, particularly on
skin, is indebted to an earlier generation of women artists, but at some remove
from the politics of feminist body art or a grungier abjection.
Clancy has been exhibiting regularly since 1995, largely outside the
commercial gallery system. Internationally, her work has been seen in Los
Angeles, Salzburg, Vienna, and Brighton; locally she has shown at the Australian
Centre for Photography, Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, and
RMIT’s Project Space, in addition to non-art venues like St. Vincent’s Hospital
and the 2003 International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne. Elixir, her
forthcoming solo show at Sydney’s thirtyseven degrees Gallery includes excerpts
from two earlier series, Visible Human Bodies, part of which is also concurrently on
view at the Australian Centre for Photography, and She carries it all like a map on her
skin, along with a new series called paper thin (2007).
paper thin, with its echoes of Plath, is also a pun on the condition of the
photograph itself. Both photography and human skin serve as a kind of index,
imprinted variously with light, time and gravity. Photography freezes that imprint
in a perfect trace, a defence, as it were, against the further ravages of time.
Mortality is never too far from Clancy’s concerns. She explains her interest in
making images of human skin. “I think we are drawn to particular subject matter
because of different experiences. In my case, it was just realising the
vulnerability and fragility of the body, and an interest in how the body can
Both photography
and human skin
serve as a kind of
index, imprinted
variously with light,
time and gravity.
Photography
freezes that imprint
in a perfect trace, a
defence, as it were,
against the further
ravages of time.
This page: Peta Clancy, Eye 2, 2005-2006. C-type print, 80 x 77cm.
Opposite page: Peta Clancy, Lashes 2, 2005-2006.
80 x 58cm.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
Above: Peta Clancy, Visible Human Bodies, 2005. Duratran,
perspex, electrical/lighting. Exhibition view, Australian Centre
for Photography, 2007.
“We can think of skin as a boundary or a container.
We think of the self as being contained by the skin,
but at the same time, the skin is ourselves.”
116
Above right: Peta Clancy, Untitled from Visible Human
Bodies series, 2005. Detail Visible Human Bodies installation,
80cm diameter.
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change rapidly.” She recalls her father’s sudden and premature death: “It made
me aware of the denial of death and mortality, mutability and ageing. You don’t
know what’s going on and you search for a visual language to understand.”
Clancy imagines herself always making work connected in some way with the
body. “I guess subjects kind of choose me. We view the world in relation to our
own bodies, and these are constantly undergoing transformation. These
changes happen beyond our control and seem to cause us anxiety.”
Two sources important for Clancy extend her work beyond the psychoanalytically
informed theories of the body in vogue in Australian art schools in the 90s. These
are the work of British artist Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) and German literary
scholar Claudia Benthien’s 2002 study of the cultural meanings attached to
human epidermis, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World. Chadwick’s
use of unusual materials and her alternately lyrical and disgusting take on
mortality underwrote a distinctive latter day practice of body art, while Benthien’s
historical anthropology acknowledges skin as a “rich and highly symbolic boundary
in the collective imagination.” Skin is additionally the site where personal identity
is both formed and assigned. Clancy explains, “We can think of skin as a boundary
or a container. We think of the self as being contained by the skin, but at the same
time, the skin is ourselves.” And, drawing on recent work in psychology, she notes
a further complication in the relationship between skin and self: “Our concept of
our body – our body image – changes according to how we are touched.”
This coil of identity, self-image and tactility informs her series This Skin I’m In
(2002), shown at the Australian Centre for Photography. Pink-toned ink-jet
images of parts of Clancy’s face were paired with small white pillows hand
stitched by the artist. Each pillow had been printed with lipstick-hued images of
skin flakes taken from Clancy’s own body, but enlarged so that they read as
abstracted blobs of feminine colour on the amorphously-shaped pillows, many
of which were adorned with an Eva Hesse-like fringe of thread. Clancy sought to
reference 70s women’s art in her sewing and fabric use – even the done-at-home
ink-transfers strike a domestic note – but formally and conceptually the series
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
marks its distance from the 70s. She wrote at the time that “the images of the
skin and the ‘skin pillows’ are intended to play aesthetic against abject
responses” to our internal bodies. Biographically they are linked to her experience
of adolescence. Clancy remembers her first eye shadow kit, a present from an
aunt who was a makeup artist, and how its presentation felt like an initiation.
While working on this series using her own discarded skin, Clancy wondered
“at what point the skin particles stopped being a part of me.” She notes
domestic dust is largely composed of dander – discarded human skin particles –
and recalls an early morning reverie: “I was trying to wake up. Gazing at the
window while the sunlight came through, I saw the most beautiful particles of
dust visible in the sun’s rays. Dust, made visible by rays of sun through a
window, consists of a large quantity of human skin, thus putting ourselves within
the beauty we see.” Waiting For The Dust To Settle, a series of photographic studies
of accumulated dust particles shows the “minute residue of our everyday lives” in
images of traces and shadows left behind when objects are moved from their
place. Clancy sees these images “rooted in the soil of everyday life.” Enlarged,
these beautiful fragments of dust and dead skin suggest mortality, “the dust,” as
Clancy puts it, “from which the body comes and to which it will return.”
These quietly mordant images are in marked contrast to the vibrant human
forms of Clancy’s 2005 series, Visible Human Bodies, developed during an artist’s
residency in the Cell and Gene Therapy Laboratory at Melbourne’s Murdoch
Children’s Research Institute at the Royal Children’s Hospital. Here, large round
lightboxes display glowing evocations of human bodies. Keen to see how “the
human body was viewed in the context of gene therapy,” Clancy produced her
images by first drawing blind with pathogenic bacteria onto Petri dishes in order
w
While working on
this series using her
own discarded skin,
Clancy wondered
“at what point the
skin particles
stopped being a
part of me.”
This page: Peta Clancy, Holding artwork created for
Visible Human Bodies series, 2004. C-type print, 17 x 13cm.
Opposite page top: Peta Clancy, Lips 1, 2005-2006.
C-type print, 80 x 52.5cm.
Opposite page bottom: Peta Clancy, Lips 2, 2005-2006.
C-type print, 80 x 57cm.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
Above: Peta Clancy, Floating 2, 2000-2005. C-type print,
54 x 67cm.
“I was trying to wake up. Gazing at the window
while the sunlight came through, I saw the most
beautiful particles of dust visible in the sun’s rays.”
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Above right: Peta Clancy, This Skin I'm In, (detail) 2002.
Ink jet prints, ink jet transfers, fabric, thread, hobby fill,
dimension variable.
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to create living likenesses. The dishes were incubated at 37C for several days,
after which the images materialised, to be subsequently photographed, enlarged
and transferred to lightboxes. Clancy wanted to duplicate the lab’s aesthetics: “I
watched the scientists view bacteria colonies on lightboxes in the lab. Plus, I
want to suggest the conditions of viewing cells through a microscope. The
individual lightbox works are like large Petri dishes.” And the bacteria,
luminescent blobs which make up the final form, are themselves metaphors for
what she describes as the “fragile, transient, mutable and constantly changing
nature of the human body” itself.
Along with portions of Visible Human Bodies, Elixir includes elements of her She
carries it all like a map on her skin (2005). Here Clancy physically reworked a series of
images – in this case close-ups of a female relative’s mouth and eyelids – by
pricking the back of the prints with a fine needle, then, with a tungsten light
raking across the surface to accentuate her markings, re-photographing them.
Instead of defilement, what results is more like an embroidery of time’s passage,
as the lines and furrows of the skin most susceptible to signs of aging are
lovingly highlighted. The series paper thin continues this technique in a group of
images showing several generations of women in Clancy’s family. Re-working the
print surface, Clancy hopes to pre-empt the impress of time upon the skin, giving
the works, as she puts it, “a Dorian Gray-like life of their own.” At the same time,
by using familial members, likenesses become apparent in recurring lines and
shapes. Reading these similarities across the images, it seems is if we see one
face in fast forward as it grows into its dermatological destiny. The fullness of
time, it would seem, is that of our withering.
Not all of the images in paper thin strike this note. Clancy also includes closeups of people she knows, showing simply portions of their face in order “to
explore youth, beauty, aging, skin colour, mortality and time.” Despite the close
cropping these are not abstracted parts but individuated portraits detailing the
curl of lip and nostril, or the arch of an eyebrow. Time’s work here is stilled by the
photograph, but not in any glamorous image of perfection. Clancy lets us
imagine the texture she shoots – pores and stubble and all – and in this
heightened, imaginary tactility, we recognise a common kinship of the skin,
fragile, mutable, and momentarily beautiful.
I
New work by Peta Clancy will be exhibited at thirtyseven degrees – Contemporary
Fine Art Gallery, Sydney from 24 November to 22 December 2007.
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