Deity by Saskia van Dijk in Auckland

‘Bodies In Between’ addresses the tension of traditional figurative painting and contemporary reconfigurations of the body, drawing inspiration from historical depictions of the non-tangible and spiritual realms within art. Just as the human body wrinkles, dries out, loses warmth and vitality over time, it simultaneously grows and adapts its physical state within a continuous cycle of becoming. To encompass the bodily lifecycle, I look to the interior body and the exterior skin of paint as a reflection of the expansive yet temporal nature as the wear and tear of the paint’s surface mingles with our own. Constructing a multifaceted body of paint, and buffing into the paint’s exterior skin allows its interior site to be both painted on and repainted in, dissolving the representational boundary between the embodied and disembodied. To capture a transitional state between embodiment and disembodiment, traditional rendering of skin is used within my works as a tool of containment between our inner and outer nature. Specifically utilising traditional figurative painting on the external surface as a hook to our tangible reality and abstract painting to perceive the intangible. By later allowing the process of sanding to reveal each layer that exists beyond the exterior skin of paint, it becomes a material representation of the psychoanalytical concept, coined by Didier Anzieu, as the ‘skin-ego’. Here skin plays a curious role as a sensorial mediator between containment of the psyche and essence of oneself that simultaneously connects our body to a wider spatial schema and external bodies. Human skin functions as a 'double sensation'. Both a border of inhabited space that is the bodily interior and exterior environment yet also a sensory connector of all material beings. If we begin to think of skin as a point of connection between inner and outer nature, it poses a conversation surrounding bodily boundaries. I invite you to consider your bodily position in between the spatiality of one another, as a continuously enfolding substance that shifts through a larger cosmological system. Incarnation, acrylic paint on wood board, W 1200mm x H 900mm, 2023 Impairment, acrylic paint on wood board, W 900mm x H 1200, 2023 Incandescence, acrylic paint on wood board, W 900mm x H 1200, 2023 Submergence acrylic paint on wood board, W 1200 mm x H 900, 2023 Deity, acrylic paint on wood board, W 1200 mm x H 2000 mm, 2023