Through self-portraiture, I use close introspection and the suggestion of points from which to enter more intimate perspectives of our understanding of the body. The circle appears as a scopic punctum - a kind of peep-hole that simultaneously prevents and enables visual representation. Hands and faces - the tactility of a mouth juxtaposed with penetrative fingers - function as probes and orifices. They offer a passport to the 'other world' of bodily cavities.

The works deny an excess of visuality, the circle here performs the role of a kind of membrane, a thin semi-transparent screen between the outside and the inside. There is an unsettling sexuality suggested in the slithering, semi-transparent paint. The circle acts as scope through which we view the body: a body which oozes and leaks and is both site and metaphor for psychological or pathological trauma.

Seeing Her Sex

McGrath, R 2002, Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body, Manchester University Press, Manchester. pg 15:

The public spectacle of the fetishised body, the fantasy of wholeness, of something seamless, beautifully complete, and its obverse, the private circulation and display of a female body with its frightening fantasy of castration, dismemberment and death, are not separate, but one and the same.

The circle acts as scope through which we view the body: a body which oozes and leaks and is both site and metaphor for psychological or pathological trauma.

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