2 self portraits
Bundanon is a great place to think about (and through) the body. Fresh air, horizon, river swimming, good food – all condusive to feeling pleasure in being a body in the world.
Today I made two self portraits. Catherine ran a workshop that made me reflect on the question of how well I know my own body from the inside, and how able I am to represent that from the outside. We lay for a long time on our backs imagining someone tracing around our body with a marker. Then we tried to draw an outline of our own body and draw our skeletons within the outline. When we had finished we teamed up with a partner and drew round each others bodies. You learn alot about being a body from doing this – though i’m not sure I can say exactly what i learnt yet. One of the interesting challenges was to get the proportions right. I kept trying to compress myself. I couldn’t believe how far my knees are from my waist. I was struck by how much space my body takes up in a room. How long my limbs and neck are, how long my whole body is.
Later Jonathan took us into the great outdoors and asked us to think about the relationship between our bodies and our surroundings. Out on the side of a hill, with bush all around me i suddenly felt very small. The feeling of my largeness vanished. I was drawn to a little hut – because the hut was built at human scale and seemed to help me modulate between me and everything else. Sitting on the verandah of the hut I thought – i wish i could fly up and see what size i appear to be from the outside, and compare it to what size i feel . I went looking for sticks that would be the same length as my bones so that I could get some perspective on the relationship of scale between me and the world. I gathered and measured and gathered and measured and slowly built a copy of my skeleton in sticks on the ground. My vertebrae were made of wombat poo (the driest poo of any mammal! – that’s a true fact). It was so comforting to be able to measure sticks against myself and then arrange them, rather than having to draw the way i imagined myself to be. When i’d finished my self portrait in sticks i walked up the hill and looked down at it from above. I am very very small. Jonathan took a photo of me and my portrait together so that i could check if i’d got the scale right. Not bad at all.
I worried that to anyone coming along it would look macabre – a stick skeleton by an old hut. But Jonathan thought it would be ok to leave it there.
self portrait with textas
Self portrait with sticks