Artist Statement

In my recent work, my primary material is fresh pigskin.  The original

motivation for the choice of this medium was the need to create a human

sculpture that would look as real as possible for a video project I had

conceived.  In working with the material, I discovered that I respond

intensely to its feel, smell, and the deeply corporal overall sensation it

engenders.  I find it's effect in sculptural work as well as in

photographs uniquely "human."

I work with both fresh material and with preserved skin that I had

treated with salt or chemicals, or which I had plastinated, a process

that involves removing the fluid contents of the skin and infusing it with

silicon in a vacuum environment.  Some of my work results in skin objects,

sometimes two-dimensional, usually sculptural, and some is photographic

documentation of objects or arrangements.

My goal is to produce work that jumps from the wall and makes its viewer

feel something intense.  I want to reveal that we are surrounded by flesh

in our ordinary environment, that many products are made out of dead

animal skin, but since it is disguised, and the process by which it has

come to be what it is, is deeply hidden, you don't really register that

your leather jacket or shoes are made of a dead animal.  My

work with a material that looks like human skin often disturbs and evokes

strong emotions.  I don't have a didactic goal per se: I'm really more

interested in producing an awareness rather than suggesting how that

awareness should be used.

My interest in skin as a material is so intense because in it I see

expressed concretely the subjects that are important to me: life,

pleasure, sex, pain, injury, aging, death and any number of more abstract

matters, like identity, gender, power relations, vulnerability, and the

whole sphere of perception itself.

Heide Hatry