Annus Epidermis (working title)
From pre-birth to post-death, we carry our own personal protection against the rigors of our environment, against the harshness of its rain, wind, cold, heat and corrosive influences. Our skin, our epidermis travels with us as an external canvas to the world, continually recycling its self to maintain structural effectiveness whilst still suffering the visible effects of time and wear. Skin is a barrier that repels environmental factors which over time will lay waste to mountains, carve rivers into bedrock or desiccate lush landscape into dry and arid desert.
Annus Epidermis will be a photographic exploration into the relationship between human skin and our human experience of time, creating a series of work that will demonstrate this relationship, ‘freezing time’ photographically in order to draw attention to the ‘passing of time’ as a human experience.
From pre-birth to post-death, we carry our own personal protection against the rigors of our environment, against the harshness of its rain, wind, cold, heat and corrosive influences. Our skin, our epidermis travels with us as an external canvas to the world, continually recycling its self to maintain structural effectiveness whilst still suffering the visible effects of time and wear. Skin is a barrier that repels environmental factors which over time will lay waste to mountains, carve rivers into bedrock or desiccate lush landscape into dry and arid desert.
Our epidermis defends us through life as our personal environmental shield, whilst also playing a key role in visual recognition, expression and individuality for us as a communicative and self-aware species. Likewise, the variations in tone or colour of skin can affect the perception of others, creating issues revolving around race, cast, culture, age, religion, politics and geography, all based on or influenced by nothing thicker than the skin of a human being and any existing preconceptions or presumptions.
Skin and time seem therefore to be closely related, our own perception of the passing of time is educated to roughly match our perception of the ageing of the skin over time, so that we expect a child to have smooth skin, a elderly man to have wrinkled skin, and for there to be a predictable path between youthfulness and agedness.
Email: leewilliamhughes@gmail.com
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