Almost Perfect
This girl was sitting in my atelier for quite a long time. I found her while strolling around a flea marked. She was so weird: an old doll, an anorexic avant la lettre. I knew there was a statue inside of her but I wasn’t quite sure where she was going. She was a skinny teenager who didn’t know whether to fall in love with boys or with girls. I gave her all the opportunities an era of the makeable human has to offer; the endless growing possibilities of plastic surgery. Her skin is stitched together and I gave her fashionably oversized lips. She is self-conscious of her pubescent breasts and tiny penis. I offered her a choice to grow into whomever she wanted to be.
You are not only displaying your work, but people can actually wear it. Your Skinover elbow length gloves offer the possibility to brave the day in someone else’s skin.
When I started to create ‘Almost Perfect’, I first made her hands and I was trying them on myself, feeling the touch of the lambskin leather. Afterwards I couldn’t forget the sensation of living in someone else’s skin, as if I were actually wearing her. So that is where it all started. And since I like to question our current concept of aesthetics, I involved someone else’s tattoos, someone else’s birth marks, scars: to explore the edge between what is beautiful and what is not.
interview bij J.F. Pierets for ET ALORS magazine
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- 2004
- 160 x 75 x 30cm
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- leather on synthetic material, suture thread, artificial hair, lashes, glass eyes, on high wooden clogs
- Available from Studio Silvia B.
- I am interested in this work