Needle Body Mapping

Katie Lewis: 201 Days, pins, pencil, thread 

Katie Lewis: Tangled Pathways, pins, enamel, thread

 

Katie Lewis: Accumulated Numbness, pins, enamel, pencil

Katie Lewis: Process of Accumulation, pins, pencil, thread

 

‘My current work traces experiences of the body through methodical systems of documentation, investigating chaos, control, accumulation and deterioration. The artificially rigid organization of my materials alludes to control– of the individual body as an institutional domain, and of irrational experience as a manageable, concrete set of events.’

‘My choice to use the body as a starting point aims to give visual form to physical sensations that are invisible to the eye and medical imaging, and only exist in the subjecetive realm. I collect data through daily documentation processes, and then generate numerous systems to allow the information to exist in a material form. I abstract and quantify the data in order to give authority and agency to subjective experiences.’

‘The work alludes to the body in certain pieces, through the text or a particular material, but the reference remains abstracted. By abstracting and codifying the work, I want to evoke a sense of the passing of time, accumulation of information, presence and absence, chaos and order, control and loss of control and the possibility of the system collapsing upon itself or reaching a breaking point.’

‘Once I devise a system for a particular piece, I follow it all the way through the work allowing the visual results to exist outside of subjective expressive decisions. By strictly following and never veering from a given system, the work is tightly controlled and asserts itself as accurate and authoritative (however false and unscientific), questioning the gap between a subjective experience and medicine’s conventions for understanding the body.’

‘The work is often organized into grid-like charts and diagrams mimicking science and medicine’s representations of the body as a specimen, visually displayed for the purpose of gaining knowledge. In this way I create distance from the information and objectify the experience, giving a false sense that the body is accessible and easily understood.’

http://katiehollandlewis.com/