Back Sculpture

My work reflects and extends the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time, 1953), relating Heidegger's authentic experience to people's experience of disability as a social construct. Heidegger believed that people spend most of their time immersed in inauthentic experience; it is not until an object is broken that we can have a true authentic experience of it. In the late 18th century the body of the 'other' has been, medically and psychologically measured and classified into a white, male, able bodied, heterosexual hierarchy. These social constructs form the basis of people's inauthentic experience of disability and otherness. In Liquidity a series of abject anthropomorphic sculptures, the damaged yet confident body of the ‘other' is displayed against the medicalised supports that hold it in place. The reflective facade of the ceramic glaze creates an anxious uncertainty of where each sculpture ends and the audience body begins, highlighting the fluid nature of disability as a social construct. The positioning of the sculptures directly on the floor removes the boundaries created by the art object on a plinth.