The Exchange Residency Day 1

The task for day one was to create a second skin with aim that this might prompt insights into the skin as a body boundary. The idea once the wrapping was complete was to cut the skin away to provide a tangible approximation of the skin as the largest sensing organ in the body.

"As the wrapping progressed I felt both a sense of comfort, like being swaddled and a discomfort in being contained. I was trying not to move and after a while became unaware of the paper except when I did move an arm or leg. Rather than accentuating the skin the paper became, not suprisingly in retrospect, a cocoon that cut me off from the world. Creating this second more rigid and less permeable additional layer revealed, particularly when it was removed, just how flexible, sensitive, elastic and permeable our skin is. As a physical layer the skin occupies and defines a limit in space but as a sensing organ it feeds and expands our perception (and experience) of the world far beyond our physical boundary." Noel

"Wrapping the body reminded me of the intricate contours of the body and the silence of skin. Noisy paper rustles, joints creak, stomachs gurgle but skin speaks through colour, texture, smell, temperature. Consider the skin spreading from the scalp to the folds between the toes. Think of its textures, soft cheeks, rough hands, wrinkly knees, translucent eyelids. Thick skinned or thin skinned, the porosity of the skin speaks of character and personality. When do wrinkles become laughter lines, crows feet the traces of a life well lived? Scars, scratches, stretch marks, our lives etched out, stories of the skin." Caroline