Embodied
AW23
Debenhams mannequin, variegated metal leaf, resin earrings, shellac varnish, spray paint
2022
Dimensions variable
In Paris, 1938, the artist and curator Salvador Dalí gave mannequins to each of his fellow artists exhibiting in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Many of the artists took this opportunity to interrupt the social representation of the body, effectively queering it. Embodied conceptually re-stages this experiment, with mannequins dating from the 1960s rather than the 1930s, recovered as found objects from a shopping mall skip. As a notable exception, the curators distributed the mannequins to the artists in parts, expanding on the exhibition’s capacity for queer intervention. AW23 is one such response, forged from the freedom to choose.
AW23 contemplates the historic representations of value creation whilst beginning to intimate new futures. Through mechanising material histories, it probes into the social processes that produce and shed such cycles of value in the first place. Mismatched hands, legs, arms and a bust were gilded with sheets of chemically-tempered factory metal consisting of copper, tin and brass to pose as a cyborg Pygmalion when assembled together, or as objects of consumption when apart. Installed around the cast iron stove, they frame a washing-line of earrings: similarly gilded drops of resin, themselves discards of bespoke luxury surface design projects swept off the floor by the artist each week, attempt to capitalize on their mannequin’s function as a frame for shedded skins. As jewellery, these shards of waste attain a new, yet ultimately empty value: they are to be consumed for free, a (valuable) nugget of information passed on through word of mouth from the curators to the viewing public. The entire process of fragmentation is watched over by the mannequin’s torso from across the kitchen table.
