Sid Holder
BA (Hons) Fine Art
The term ‘body’ has a number of meanings: the physical structure of a person or animal; the trunk of an organism (as distinguished from the limbs); a corpse; a single material object; a collection of knowledge; the main section of a vehicle; the content of a written message; a group of people with a shared function. To ‘body’ something: to give it form or shape; to symbolise or represent it; to apply force to it physically. All of these definitions express a facet of the experience of being, having and inhabiting a body.
With advances in biological study, science corroborates Julia Kristeva’s assertions about the body- the permeability of its borders, the threat which this indistinction presents to the psyche- and complicates our understanding of what it means to be both human and discretely so. No longer delimited physically or temporally, the future body is increasingly integrated with technology, even becoming a material in itself.
My work responds to personal and cultural anxieties around death, the ways in which our relationship to mortality manifests throughout history, eventually being dispelled from everyday life but never fully supressed. I investigate the personification of objects through form, presenting an alternative kind of body and asking the viewer to identify with the inanimate, to consider their own status as an impermanent object as well as the body’s three-fold position as self, object, and place. Sculpture and image come together to create a fractured view of the whole: the perishable object which yields to time and the undying image, capturing only its surface.
