* Germany
lives and works in New York, NY

In my recent work, my primary material is fresh pigskin. The original
motivation for the choice of this medium was the need to create a human
sculpture that would look as real as possible for a video project I had
conceived. In working with the material, I discovered that I respond
intensely to its feel, smell, and the deeply corporal overall sensation it
engenders. I find it's effect in sculptural work as well as in
photographs uniquely "human."

I work with both fresh material and with preserved skin that I had
treated with salt or chemicals, or which I had plastinated, a process
that involves removing the fluid contents of the skin and infusing it with
silicon in a vacuum environment. Some of my work results in skin objects,
sometimes two-dimensional, usually sculptural, and some is photographic
documentation of objects or arrangements.

My goal is to produce work that jumps from the wall and makes its viewer
feel something intense. I want to reveal that we are surrounded by flesh
in our ordinary environment, that many products are made out of dead
animal skin, but since it is disguised, and the process by which it has
come to be what it is, is deeply hidden, you don't really register that
your leather jacket or shoes are made of a dead animal. My
work with a material that looks like human skin often disturbs and evokes
strong emotions. I don't have a didactic goal per se: I'm really more
interested in producing an awareness rather than suggesting how that
awareness should be used.

My interest in skin as a material is so intense because in it I see
expressed concretely the subjects that are important to me: life,
pleasure, sex, pain, injury, aging, death and any number of more abstract
matters, like identity, gender, power relations, vulnerability, and the
whole sphere of perception itself.

Heide Hatry