The
act of writing on the face makes explicit the connections between
thought and expression. What I think is often revealed on my
features: I would make a terrible poker player, or liar. (Which does
not, of course, stop me from lying, though it's fair to say that I'm
not that keen on poker.)
In
these works, I was trying – in a very obvious manner, perhaps –
to express something about how we are shaped – down to our very
features – by language. The laying or layering of language onto
image tries to hint at ways of expressing our search for meaning and
identity through words.
The
text comes from a number of sources: Latin copy from a book by John
Ray, that great collector of words as well as insects, his love of
etymology and entomology going hand in hand. Also transcripts of a
conversation with an art historian: a rambling discourse, often
breaking into profanity, in which he tries to help me situate my
practice.
Most tellingly for me, on one cast – of my whole head –
I used copies of letters from my father. These were not sent to me,
but inherited after his death – line after line of his thoughts,
opinions, invectives, humour and anger tinged with alternating
self-pity and misogyny – all in a crabbed, controlled, obsessively
neat copperplate hand. I feel unfairly shaped by his presence. I
also, more unfairly, see much of his personality in myself. And
here, on me.
After
making 'letter head', I learnt about a verse form called pantoum: a
Malay verse form, it seemed apt to me as much of my striving for a
sense of identity and place is born of being mixed-race, half native
Malay and half colonial English, a third-culture child. I wrote a
pantoum – not a good one – entitled 'I am all written in my
father's hand'. I never, of course, actually applied this poem to my
face.
The
process of applying the text – transferring it from printed page to
face – necessarily reverses it, unless I take the trouble to
reverse it before application. Sometimes I do, so that it is, in part
at least, legible. Sometimes I prefer it to stand mirrored, so it's
meaning is obscured and the letters become shapes and patterns, like
tattoos in another language whose characters are not familiar to us.
And later, I took to carving text directly into the mould – writing
in reverse, so that when a cast was taken it would be the right way
round. These carved texts stand proud of the skin, not laid onto it
but emerging directly from it, as happens with a condition called
dermatographic urticaria. It seemed to me that some thoughts are so
powerfully experienced, or exact so vigorous a force upon the self,
that they could rise up under the skin: that the skin itself – the
largest organ of the body – could be both medium and message.
My
first experiment with carving words into a mould, in reverse,
freehand and off the top of my head, brought forth "what if the
weather-map of your emotional life were engraved upon the very skin
of your face?" Nothing deep or meaningful. I was imagining that
a condition like that would willy-nilly transcribe your emotions
(rather than your thoughts, say) on to your skin – as the devil
might use you as parchment, if you were possessed. But in this case,
possessed only by the raw and chaotic nature of your self. Why
weather-map? The truth is that I was going to use just 'map', but
needed a longer word to fit across: and the notion of weather being
untameable, out of one's control, chimed with how I felt about the
process. That feelings and words swirl around, ungraspable until they
push their way out of your skin.
Sometimes,
perhaps, what I think may be literally written all over my face.
