Rebecca Fuentes

BEd Art and Design Teaching / movement of skin

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Theme

The skin is a natural thing to us, we know how it moves and reacts to certain things. I wanted to work on the idea of pushing what skin is and to make it something unknown.

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Melt

I wanted to create a sister piece to the pictures I took of my friend wrapped in plastic.

It’s a black and white portrait , with broken condoms to give the skin that weird gross texture.

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SKIN

This was created using compostable fruit and vegetable bags. I used paint to mimic the color of skin and the material of the bag gave it the lines and folds skin has.

I then filled the bags with red paint and water to give it a bloody, more gruesome feel.

This process was messy and exciting, it captured a strange, uneasy feeling of skin.

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Abnormality of the skin

For this we used cling film and a condom blowed up to play around with the idea of being bigger than humanly possible, or stuck in uncomfortable positions.

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Erwin Wurm

“In this series, I tried making up bodies and then started to demolish them, or deconstruct them, or change forms—I tried to create something else and to bring something else out of it.”

Erwin Wurm has inspired me to push the limits of what the human body could look like, to break the structure of the body and have fun with the shapes and constructs.

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Jenny Saville

“In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.”

The vulnerable, uncomfortable beauty of these paintings is quite striking. The way the skin folds, the shadows and the poses. Skin is meant to be stretched and moved in with it changing over time as we grow and get older. I think these paintings are grotesque yet eye catching.

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the skin pt. 2

The needle pushes through the top layer of the skin but doesn’t hurt or bleed. The many layers of our skin protect us, are flexible and enduring.

With pressure the skin changes to a white color while the rest stays normal.

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the skin pt. 1

With this I wanted to focus on the rolls of the body and the shadows they create. I got my friend to move in different ways to see how the skin folds in changing positions.

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Experimenting with Skin

“The painters skin” by Henrik Isaksson Garnell, really inspired me to play around with my own skin (safely) and see what I could make of it.

I used a small wooden board painted to have a skin tone look to it, have blues and reds throughout it for a bit of contrast. Then I used paint to glue down the skin peels laying them around randomly and natural so they blend in yet have the texture I was looking for.

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Inspiration

My interest so far has been in skin, the folds, the movement of cells etc.

This video shows keratinocytes which are a major cell type in the outer layer of skin. They move together in sheets to close an open wound.

I think this works with my project ideas and would like to play around with animation, or even cooking eggs to have that same movement the cells have.

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Henrik Isaksson Garnell

“Henrik Isaksson Garnell is a Swedish artist who has personal experiences of self-harm behaviour. His series The Painter’s Skin has to be seen in that aspect and also in respect of it.”

“The Painter’s Skin” is a gorgeous yet uncomfortable series of artworks. The color choices , the layering of the skin and the marks/self-harm through out them. The texture seems smooth yet with the bumps/lines adding the toughness and roughness of skin.

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Renee Verhoeven

“Part of it, I think, is that gloves have to be flexible in so many directions and aim for a perfect fit (like a second skin). And if they are well made, I think gloves can be beautiful.”

“My approach was to react to leather as a material, its capabilities and the perception of it as a fashion material. I simply took the construction of skin (leather) as an inspiration for this project.”

The way Renee works the fabric with such delicacy, cutting and molding the leather inspires me as the gloves are useful yet have a beautiful look to them. An abstract form of skin and hands.

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I used fabric from carpet samples and laid them down in folds, painting bruises and scars to give it a more human like feel.

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This is a work in progress that I made during the sculpture and mixed media workshop. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and has inspired me to try different forms of work for this semester

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Sculpture and Mixed Media

This activity was to write nouns that you could do with your hands. Then to go around changing words and getting new ideas. At the end we circled the words that inspired us and wrote the materials we could use.

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In some cases of sexual harassment it feels like your voice has been taken and your own skin makes you feel like a monster.

Blue being sadness and the red is anger, the metal to show the inability to let people in again.

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Samuel Cirnansck

The beauty of this piece has genuinely been unforgettable for me. Weddings are supposed to be the happiest day of your life yet the bondage and gagging of it reminds me of all the other cases a wedding can happen, whether it being arranged, a child marriage, or trapped into it.