Undressing Innocence

There are few things in life as deeply beautiful and natural as a naked body. Something that has been with us from the beginning of our days. Our mothers and fathers embraced us naked as we came. So where is it that nakedness and nudity become something not to show? Was it with Adam and Eve who became aware and ashamed? Or did clothes simply become a form of hygiene and protection? Identification and individualism? A form of show- casing or hiding sexual tension? What is our relation to clothes and our naked bodies today?

In this series of work I researched and explored the human behaviour and questions connected to nudity, nakedness, the erotic and the in between.

Inspired by Nudism, Naturalism, John Berger’s Ways of seeing, pornography, selfies and Marlene Dumas’s “the Stripping girls” I created multiple photo series, videos, poems and material nipples to confront these ideas and questions.

Undress
Undress
Undress me
Layer by layer
Little piles fall to the floor
The elements I choose
Choose as my image
My form
A form in which I showcase myself
To the outside
Another piece drops
Shed, Shed
Shed it all
Uncovering more and more
But, am I truly revealing myself?
Or only exhibiting a different form?
Do you feel closer to me?
With every increasing inch of bare skin
Showing you what lies beneath
Yet, not within.

Shedding these things
These clothes that have become part of me
Have we truly merged?
Are we now one?
Yet I feel more free
Free away from you
As I stand here
With nothing to cover me
This is what I am
A body
A body of flesh
I can feel every sensation
Tingling on my flesh
More heightened
More alive, more real
I do not feel the need to conceal
Concealing what we all share.

 

Stitching in Poetry

A embroidered photo series of snapshots from a video installation where I slowly undressed whilst recited poems I wrote about undressing and nudity. The difference between posture and posing, loose hair or tied up. With each new stitch I placed on the photographs of my naked body I was redressing myself in a thoughtful and long process. Confronting myself in the aim to discover the borderline between naked and nude. Where lies the lines between naked and covered? Personal and un-personal?

 

   Fully covered or still nude?
   The nipple shirt plays between the fine lines of dressed and undressed.
   Using Felted nipples as props for creating a reaction in the viewer.

   Focus on the revealing.
   Focus on the movement.
   Focus on the intent.
   Focus on the flesh.

   I look down to my feet
   Black, Dark and Dirty
   I place them on the covers
   Trying not to mark them too much
   Finding a comfortable posture
   To get absorbed in
   To float away in
   I feel the heat prickling my back
   So warm, so soothing
   I place my head on the pillows
   No blankets to cover me
   I feel comfortable
   Almost ready to drift away
   Then I remember
   All those chairs
   Tables, pages and pencils
   That panel staring
   Searching, Studying me as I lie here
   I am their object, Their research
   They examine my every curve
   Naked flesh is what they see
   Here in front of them
   I am a naked stranger
   Even so, I am all nudes they have ever perceived I am no different than Venus,       David or Eve
   I bare it all for them, To see a version of myself transpire on paper
   A immortal image
   A body of me, A body of us all

   Nude Modelling – Poem Projected on semi nude model.