Skin Film
Emma Hart
16mm clear leader and sellotape, 11 min
UK 2005–2007
“By sticking sellotape to my skin and then peeling it off, I took off the top surface of my skin. I then stuck the tape and the skin to clear 16mm film. I have made a film of how much space I take up and this takes 11 minutes to watch.” (Emma Hart)
Skin Film sits among Hart’s diverse, mixed-media oeuvre, emphasizing the artist’s concern with the intersection of materiality and a dislocated sense of the personal; readily contributing to the field of what Vicky Smith (2012) has called “full body film,” and carrying, in its own way, a family likeness to Thorsten Fleisch’s Skinflick, 2001. Consisting of a complete body’s-worth of dead skin ripped from the artist using sellotape and not preserved via a photographic film print, Skin Film has a limited lifespan. Consequently, more than one version has been made. Hart draws attention to the complexities of the surface of film, the hermeneutic part-to-whole relation between each photogram as it appears on-screen and the reel to which it belongs, and the enlarged scale of the projected image. In quantifying the space her body takes up in temporal terms, Hart invites a reconsideration of principles governing the duration of films. That is to say, not the length of time needed to tell a story or present a sequence of events, nor the time needed to work through a series of structural or conceptual configurations, let alone any aleatory or intuitive principles; rather, quite bluntly, we have the surface of a human body. (Barnaby Dicker)
Emma Hart, born 1974 in England, lives and works in London.
Video
Watch an excerpt from Skin Film on Vimeo.
References
Kim Knowles, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Bodily Inscriptions in Contemporary Experimental Film,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (2013), http://www.necsus-ejms.org/blood-sweat-and-tears-bodily-inscriptions-in-contemporary-experimental-film/.
Vicky Smith, “Full Body Film,” Sequence, no. 3, 2012, pp. 44–47.