Nine Skins: Polaroids & Performance 2005

The body seems to me our most precarious, crucial and intimate shelter. The body is our only refuge when we roam, whenever we are away from the safe container of home. We do not, however, choose the bodily shelters of our skeletal frames, our skins, or our genetically conjured surfaces, though these remain our closest and primary abode.

In response to this lack of choice, garments become all the more invested with hope and potential as objects that can alter, adjust, define, enfold and protect us. We prepare these new skins daily as necessary coatings, learning to transform to diverse environments, chameleon-like. The ensuing layers of garment, fabric and form grant us shelter even as they reveal and conceal.

Even in the small increment of day to day I still believe in the myth I learned when I was younger and softer, of nine possible lives. It seems that these nine chances happen not on the grand scale of reincarnated existence, but in the mundane, particular inventions and transformations of day to day, in the transformative in-between realms of dress and undress.

There is something luscious and a bit terrible in removing garments: a moment of dislocation occurs when these shirts, these temporary skins crumple and lay as independent, still warm shapes on the floor, deflating without interiority. Nine skins is a series derived from this ordinary ritual of nightly undress.