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Skin Portraiture: Embodied Representations In Contemporary Art, Heidi Kellett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, human skin has been explored as a medium, metaphor, and milieu. Images of and objects made from skin flesh out the critical role it plays in experiences of embodiment such as reflexivity, empathy, and relationality, expanding conceptions of difference. This project problematizes the correlation between the appearance of the epidermis and a person’s identity. By depicting the subject as magnified, fragmented, anatomized patches of skin, “skin portraiture”—a sub-genre of portraiture I have coined—questions what a portrait is and what it can achieve in contemporary art. By circumnavigating and obfuscating the subject’s face, skin portraiture perforates the boundaries …