Peel my Skin - Limited Edition of 1 Photograph

I am attempting in my work to think about the female body and intimacy outside the discourses on sexism and capitalism that I find debilitating and therefore limiting. Using my body as my main medium, I return to newly-marginalised, ‘essentialist’ feminist art practices of the 1970s and ‘80s, which considered the connection between women and the natural world, to explore again, in a new century, the notion of female subjectivity as produced through the female body as it walks through, brushes past, and lies upon such environments as the forest-floor. My interests lie especially in the female body as wounded and mended, as repaired through the natural world, and these interests extend from my representations of my body in the natural world to the methods by which I make and disseminate them. A recent experience using plants to treat hormonal dysfunction inspired me to work more closely with organic materials. Over the past few months I have photographed details of my body and of nature, developing films with plant-based developers, printing them onto plant-based papers that I create and seed myself. The fragility and transparency of these papers resemble the thin veil of skin. I like to imagine my body and nature as entangled, as a relation which is about tenderness and infinity as well as femininity. I leave these prints in the forest, strapped around trunks, weighted down in the mud, buried un- der the moss or afloat in a stream. The papers, which are biodegradable, are sometimes eaten by insects and other animals. At other times, they are destroyed by the roots of plants growing from the paper they are printed upon, the work both consuming and sustaining itself. On occasions, they simply decay from exposure to the elements. I theorise such transformations as stages within a ‘bodysystem’, as ritualised moments of change in which I return a part of myself to nature, channelling the energy borrowed from the natural world during my creative process.