Skin of the Earth

“It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending. Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things.” Anne de Marcken, ‘It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over’

These fourteen artists work at the border where the world ends and the human begins. Their artwork treats the self not as a finished, isolated object but as a site of constant exchange — porous, entangled, in ongoing negotiation with the land, with other bodies, with matter itself. By rejecting the body as a closed circuit, they locate the human as an intermediary being, something between internal biology and the wider systems of the world. The works are alive to connection, to the abject, to the fragile beauty found in the vulnerability of physical surfaces. Skin, in these paintings, is always a threshold rather than a boundary.

The works navigate a liminal border and reflect a shift away from seeing humans as separate entities and toward a vision of total entanglement. In these works, the earth is resonant with life and the human form is a set of agreements among matter and energy. This show is an invitation to look at the bright peripheries of the everyday, where the distinction between our internal landscapes and the terrestrial world starts to dissolve.

“The world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries.” Martin MacInnes, ‘In Ascension’

“One gets to know the world, gets to know a language for describing the world, but does not get to know oneself. The majority of people – almost all, I would say – never learn, as long as they live, a language in which they could describe themselves.” Jacek Dukaj, ‘Ice’