About the Work
This two-part installation was created in response to Hjort’s Factory’s historical exhibition on glazes. Using linen canvas, golden paint, silver sewing thread, photo transfers, and MDF, the piece explores the skin as both surface and symbol - an interface between interior and exterior, history and body, glaze and ground. By combining tactile materials with conceptual layering, the work investigates how feminine identity, memory, and corporeality intersect with craft traditions and the cultural archive.

What follows is a poetic text accompanying the work - a personal and mythic reflection on the body, transformation, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Skin - our collective Kora

Still greasy and moist, the skin carries traces of a cold and barren winter - poised at the threshold between meaning and meaninglessness. From psyche to body, something is deposited beyond an imagined boundary. The object in the work takes on a quality of objectivity; it resists the female body, the subject.

This is not just about sexuality. As part of the animal realm, the work explores that which unsettles identity - system, order - a space for sensual rupture. Here, at this edge, I separate myself from the insistent and painful materiality of death. This is the border between real and phantasmagoric perceptions.

An aesthetic experience of the emaciated body arises—both a part of and apart from the skin. It emerges in the holes. It tingles with hair. The object becomes one of and in the skin. Animalistic, yes - but with the trace of a cultivated elegance.

It is also a site of primary regression, where divided organs occupy a liminal zone - the human’s human body. It is a sacrifice, a kind of predetermined living dead. A specific decay, even deformation - a conscious choice to side with what is radically excluded from the nourishing projections of life.

With transference comes love. The space fractures - drawing us back again and again into its circuit. It is more of an unconscious terrain. A mature knot, a mythical node, shaped by personal archaeology. A space willing to surrender, even sacrifice, its own etymology. A threshold state, or transformation in process?

The historically abject is perverse, precisely because it neither submits nor refuses - it defies prohibition, undercutting boundaries, laws, and conventions. In this, a moment of recognition occurs between the skin of the earth and the skin of the body.

This is articulated through a linear architecture of repetition, tracing what feels like something new inside an otherwise entrenched societal framework. A grounded object, covered in skin and hair, uses the female body as a site from which to speak - not only of desire and power - but to deconstruct the expectations of the feminine Other. It becomes both subject and object, held in relation to Kora - the feminine form.

© Camilla Howalt