My research is an exploration of the spaces between bodies. If we ask the question, “where does my body end and yours begin?” the answer could be the literal location of the skin, but what if I touch you (to make a point, or by accident, or sexually, or violently, or I sneeze, or I say something meaningful, or someone else mentions something I said to them, or I left a mark on a wall, or a mark on a page), and then a body fluid or hair or thought becomes attached to you. The space(s) between us are less contained than a simple presence or absence of touch. We are constantly engaging, overflowing, interrupting, contaminating or avoiding other bodies. This murkiness is manifested socially in an abundance of rules, laws and etiquette around touching: property boundaries, sexual rituals, containment of disease and emotion, privacy and shame surrounding the public exposure or release of body fluids all point to a social inability to pin down and limit the fluidity of the boundaries between bodies.
Why does touch require tact? Contact causes change, leaves residue, alters what is touched. When I touch you, you also touch me: we are both changed and made other to ourselves in the exchange that occurs. Our individual isolation is temporarily merged, and in the duration of that merger, we are in a crucial situation of redefining, negotiating, struggling and locating the boundaries between us. Of course, the touch o f a loved one is not, in a sense, a touch that changes. It is comforting, reassuring, secure, familiar: from family, and in many ways like self-touching. (This is only to say that familiar touches, familiar ways of touching, become incorporated into the extended body and do not have as resonant an affect). Touching or being touched unfamiliarly is not comfortable, is not a repetition of the familiar boundary of safety that protects and reassures people that they know who and where they are. My work manifests itself as a frontier through which to re-experience one’s own body and context as a frame of unfamiliar reference. I am trying to create instances in which the participant is touching (their own) otherness. To disorient the participant as a means to activate a creative re-experience of the familiar.
To do this, my work situates itself in / on the boundaries between a person and world or other person. For example Open Wide (2005), is a scored event in which participants insert one latex-gloved finger into the mouth of a partner while accepting the finger of that partner into their own mouth. In this, each person becomes engulfed in another person, blurring the boundaries between self and other. In the duration of this exploration, the latex glove becomes significant as simultaneously an excessive yet flimsy boundary between exploring, penetrating finger and opened, wet, silenced mouth. In Fountain (2006), I installed a functional shower in a public sculpture courtyard inviting passersby to immerse themselves in a private ritual as performance. Part choreography, part architecture, my intention is for the bodily experience of the participant to generate an actively creative give-and-take engagement with the space of publicly accepted ‘reality’.
By inhabiting the frontier of the participant(s)’s body, the work engages both the notion - and physical location – of boundary as both horrifyingly necessary and unattainably absent. In our current climate of the control of the movement of bodies and contaminants, I am trying to release the potential for transfer, communication and overlap of carefully organized and divided bodies/space.
