Peta Clancy
Statement:
Peta Clancy works with photography to explore the themes of transience, temporality, mutability and the corporeal and subjective limits of the human body.
For the series 'She carries it all like a map on her skin' Clancy was informed by ideas of the relations between the skin and the self. Using a very fine needle she overworks the photographic surface, accentuating details and the marks left by time, age and feeling in the skin. Each of the photographs is re-photographed to restore that surface in the sheen of the final Type C print. In these large-scale photographs the skin is depicted as an ever-changing topography.
Visible Human Bodies reference notions of the scientific fragmentation and abstraction of the human body. Working in scientific laboratories Clancy uses living bacteria to draw the human figure in Petri dishes. The growing bacteria figures are photographed throughout the process of incubation. The photographs are enlarged to (human) life-size and presented as circular light boxes.
Whether it is via her engagement with the skin or the microscopic forms, that can so profoundly affect our lived experience, in her photographs the boundaries of the body and the self are depicted as irregular and in a constant state of change.