Installation view of There are seams in purgatory with two works from Hudspith’s Skin Suit performance series (2020).
There are seams in purgatory
Featured exhibtion; McDonough Museum of Art
Youngstown OH, USA
January 21 – March 5, 2022
There are seams in purgatory is a collaborative exhibition of new work between five female-identifying artists, Sarah Bowling, Laura Hudspith, Rosabel Rosalind, Rebecca Shapass, and Caroline Yoo participating with her artist collective Han Diaspora Group. Engaging in a cross-disciplinary dialogue that spans sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and performance, the artists confront questions of betweenness and becoming through celebration, pain, humour, rage, and meditation. There are seams in purgatory exists where the boundaries of identity, intimacy, and power are tested and transgressed. There are seams in purgatory emphasizes that the value of betweenness is not in its ability to arrive at an ultimate embodied goal, but rather to embrace the metamorphoses of identification that are ever in flux.
Laura Hudspith’s work is an invitation to embodiment; to unfurl, transmute, and reform, to be naked in the face of possibility and to be unafraid. Two from the series of five photographs that is Hudspith’s Skin Suit performance series are on view in the exhibtion. Emerging from a body of work titled Illness and Objecthood first begun in 2019 following the artist’s first major autoimmune event, photographs Between she and her (Peel), and Geography of Skin (a Limbic Abjuration) are documents of a private performance and ritual where the artist painstakingly created upon herself, and then removed, a protective barrier across the contours of her body.
Between she and her (Peel), (2020) Archival inkjet print on enhanced matte photo paper. Edition of three; 20 x 28 inches, 23 x 31 inches framed
Geography of Skin (a Limbic Abjuration), (2020) Archival inkjet print on enhanced matte photo paper. Edition of three; 20 x 28 inches, 23 x 31 inches framed
A peom, which borrows its title from the series, accompanies the photographs. Hudspith’s ongoing/durational sculpture Bed of Nails (2020-) is also featured in the exhibition.
Vast terrain
between she and her
Moving quickly across a geography of skin
between spaces of ache and fever incensed
by twinning forces of soft breath and coarse cloth alike
Pallid flesh so fluent in apology
Betweenness, she moves to cover her shame
Desperate, she prepares for endurance
to heal her disunion, she thinks
A limbic abjuration
an asomatous shedding
The nature of her person, her
motivation runs constant and
suffuses her being
To spackle and smooth scarified surface
to patch and scrape, buttress and bolster
incite the site of neurological non-happening
to live in between the in-between
a space of her own making
by defacing facets of life and limb no longer
(mine)
Now hewn in silicone suit
a suitable second skin, her sultry twin
the fruits of her labour born out, and
body that threatens perpetual decay
held breathless, buoyant
elasticity, yet
gentle, like the dimples
and the creases
and the softened protrusions
of her now hardened remains
a body no longer hers, but
new now
once more
Vampiric full-body lift
illusive peel alchemic