A large part of my practice is life casting my own body. By taking moulds of segments of myself I am able to isolate the body parts and create new and partial forms that look alien and surreal on their own in a white space.
The difficult and straining interactions between my body and the life casting materials becomes ritualistic, a form of collaboration. This intimate performance of self casting allows me to embed myself within my work. Areas of the life casting will warp or break due to the difficulty of doing it myself. I am restricted only to the areas of the body I can reach, these imperfections are what make the work all the more important to me.
I have been thinking a lot about liminal space. In anthropology, liminality is defined by the feeling of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage or ritual. In this state, the participant no longer holds their pre-ritual status but have not yet achieved the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. I feel that each time I perform self casting, I understand myself a little bit better. If you look at it like performing a ritual, all the time during the process I am stuck within a liminal space.
Recently, I have been taking multiple life casts of the same body part and joining the moulds together to create conjoined and monstrous forms. Introducing the grotesque into the female body is extremely interesting. It pushes the body to ‘the edge of the human condition’; the point at which the body becomes monstrous or corrupted.
