BodiesTouchingBodies

Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat, female bodies

Bibliographic Data

ID8074036
AuthorsRobert Colls (0000-0002-5033-3116, Durham University, corresponding author), Rachel Colls
Year2011
Volume19
Issue2
Pages175-192
Publication date2011-06-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGender Place & Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0966-369X • E-ISSN: 1360-0524
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0966369x.2011.573143
OpenAlexW2082282705
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited44

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do

Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Materiality (auditing · Morpho · Painting · Sociology · Surprise · Visual arts · Communication · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Spatial and Cultural Studies

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