Amorphous bodies / the space between

Peta Clancy works with photography to explore the themes of transience, temporality, mutability and the corporeal and subjective limits of the human body. For the series She carries it all like a map on her skin Clancy was informed by ideas of the relations between the skin and the self. Using a very fine needle she overworks the photographic surface, accentuating details and the marks left by time, age and feeling in the skin. In these large-scale photographs the skin is depicted as an ever-changing topography.

The series Visible Human Bodies reference notions of the scientific fragmentation and abstraction of the human body. Working in scientific laboratories Clancy uses living bacteria to draw the human figure in Petri dishes. The growing bacteria figures are photographed throughout the process of incubation. Whether it is via her engagement with the skin or the microscopic forms Clancy explores the boundaries of the body and the self as irregular and in a constant state of change.

Date: 4 May - 15 May
Time: 10am - 5pm
Opening: Thursday 7 May 2009, 5 - 7 pm
Floor Talk: Thursday 7 May 2009, 3 - 4 pm
Location: Faculty Gallery, Art & Design Building
Enquiries: Jill Winfield
Email: Jill.Winfield@artdes.monash.edu.au
Phone: 9903 2882

Image: Peta Clancy, Lips 1 from the series She carries it all like a map on her skin, 2006, Type C-Print, 50 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.