July 2019
AIRSpace Projects, Marrickville

Dual Bodies

Emma Pinsent & Alice Cherry

The body is a material.
The body is being.

Malleable in nature, the body can be shaped and molded, existing in a state of ambiguity and liminality. Dual Bodies explores this dichotomy of bodily representation, presenting works by emerging artists, Emma Pinsent and Alice Cherry. Conversing in a space of mediated duality and friction, both artists allude to the body through reductionist and formal modes; a suggestive pulsation to the anthropomorphic and the uncanny body; internal and external (co)relations. Slippages occur as these depictions pertain a sense of humanness, whilst dissociating with formal accuracy; bodily, but not quite the body. This exhibition inherently pertains dualistic tensions, explicitly; drawing and sculpture, organic form and artificial colour, soft and solid sensations, saturation and absence, positive and negative space, and public and private realities. These conflictions in individual and collective interpretation nuance the body’s infinite potentialities and contradictions, raising questions around what the body is, can, and could be. 

The materiality of Pinsent’s objects leads expectations of the body astray, inciting the body as an enigmatic material that pertains many shapes and forms. Through embodying bright and lurid colour, and externalising anatomic references, her figures obtain a magnetic indecisiveness, to which one might consider how such an uncanny and unnatural body can be seemingly so endearing and organic.

In juxtaposition, Cherry utilises mark-making to investigate the relationship between the construction of (self) identity and its influence on the representation of the feminine body. The reductive linearity of her illustrations gesture to a sense of rawness, an unfiltered emotional engagement with and understanding of her body. This evocative allusion to the bodily, without formalisation or personalisation, negates the body as a material used to navigate and locate one’s sense of self and being; the body becoming intimate, private, and concealed in its absence of exactness.