I haven't mentioned it yet, but I had a job - I have recently jacked it in and there's a large chance I'll be spending my free time meticuliously removing tracing paper sheaths of skin from my horrendously burnt legs. I managed to ignore the discovery of skin cancer and burn my skin so badly it looks like a scold from a child-like kettle accident. The burn, as ever, didn't materialise till the eveing and started pumping out heat like the bonnet of my poor old overheated Ford Fiesta. Monday night - having dutifully consumed a small ocean of H2O - I got up to emmit said liquid and discovered that I couldn't walk. This was a little shocking - the skin was so tight i could not extend my legs beyond a rather inellegant chair pose. On tip toes I made it, lip bitten and my face futher reddened up to scarlet tones.
Several days later a skin prickling itch struck my belly (scene of similar melonin carnige), with an agonised grasp I made it to the loos - we were in bloody Raffles at the time so at least they were nice bogs. Lifting up my top i discovered a kind of blown wall paper effect across my plush skin, where it had been grapsed it tore and fell off in tatters damp. Since then the legs have gone too and so a trail of discarded cells is left in my wake. Aleo vera in hand I moisturise and sneak to secluded spots for a bit of facinated peeling. Why oh why is it so required, so totally absorbing - it's the most relentless addiction. There's no end to it - and each satisfying piece quicky snaps, wilts and becomes another wet tissue-like ball between my grasping fingers. Then a return to frustrated picking to find another biggy - but none will come. My consideration for unsuspecting onlookers has dwindled, fogged by the conviction that satiating my desire to peel is exclusively important - beyond concern for the comfort of others, never mind good manners, hygiene etc.
I beleive there's a lesson in all this - my ability to obsessively persure a thought has materialsied into a physical process of crazed skin harvesting. I'm fidgetting and restless - and there's no end to it. Please let me write some more else i'll be intimatly gazing at dead epidermis for the evening.
The highlight of this whole debacle has to be my debut as a life model which wonderfully placed itslef in the midst of my skin trauma. And so it was on Tuesday I had to expalin to my contact 'now I'm happy to go ahead but I have to warn you I'm sunburnt badly.' 'So you have some tan lines.' 'Well you could say that' (nervous laugh at this description of my paler parts and their patchy firey neighbours - as is often the case the burn was to a selected parts of my physique, ensuring comedy value). She reckons they can imagine in the correct colours so we're going ahead.
And so it was on Thursday I revealed my beautiful but punished flesh to a room full of observers. I became an object, and like any good object I was still. For 45 minutes I maintained my elegent lounging pose - looking out into the distance beyond the eyes that skated across my form tracing its shape converting eye data to mental date and back to mechanical data and back to me; but me in 2D. In 2D I had no sunburn - I had symetircal breasts, the face of a Modigliani, curvier thighs, six fingers in one case (they were students). I was actually complemented on my stillness, my Virgonean obsessiveness without skin to peel had instead focused in maintaining a new level of bodily rigidity.
There's much to say about the being naked to an audience, I'm still processing. Most important would be a recommendation - go do it. Go on. Someone is going to study your straights and curves, your held and loose, your soft and rough - you will be still, without fidgit, or a chance to move away from that feeling you don't like. In every moment you can retreat into mental movement, but without your attention that thigh will roll - the shoulder will slip. And so in every moment you can stay with the crooked and stiffening knee, the soft folds of belly which kiss and leave as you breathe, the drooping fingers and warming wrists, hands filling with nothing and feeling it sat in your palm, the solid ache of back muscle. If you just breath into it and rememeber the pain goes like time, no need to move and deny it the chance.
Saturday bought more nakedness, minus some pinkness. This time active poses, capturing tension and strength. Behind me charcoal scraped and scratched curves and space, the outcome - sketch after sketch of bums and backs, my feet balckened with what never made it on to the page and my arms full of needles and relief. The sculptor made me a dynamic bulging vital dancer. The painter made me a mess of blackness, a movement captured, a decernable physical shape that's alomst not even there. The dour faced chap made me who knows what, all his creations where quickly turned over as he compledted them at a speedy rate.
I went through all my fears before this, they were plenty. They'll make me do porn poses, they'll think I'm fat/ugly etc, they'll come on to me, I'll run out screaming, I'm exploiting myself, not liberating anything... But the only thing I totally forgot to worry about was the permenance of the record of my exposure - not until invited to compare the diffferent approaches taken did it occur to me that my nakedness remains after sticking my clothes back on. I'm in a picture - that me has a seperate exisitence, it's not me now but a picture of an unknown model. It'a painting, a piece of art, a sketch, a study, a practice.
Meanwhile the live version is still here. Clothed. Ha! Had you scared!
