Kate Just, PhD Project: The Texture of Her Skin
Glen Eira Gallery, Caulfield
2013
From 2010- 2013, I undertook a practice-led PhD project in Sculpture at Monash University entitled The Texture of Her Skin: A Studio Project Excavating and Reweaving Visions of Female Subjectivity. Upon completion, I was awarded the 2013 Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
My research culminated in a major exhibition of visual works at Glen Eira Gallery in Caulfield and an accompanying written exegesis. The project was developed in counterpoint to dominant visual representations that centre on women’s object-hood and suppression in their skin. Through a series of visual art works, I explored the evocative and connective character of skin, and advanced its potential to visualise female embodiment and subjectivity.
The archive of ‘artefacts’ presented in the exhibition was developed in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Vienna, Krems and Melbourne, reflecting an engagement with visual histories of skin and the body in each place. Comprising a series of surgical tools, archaeological relics, knitted second skins and armours, the works question and reconfigure surface accounts of the female body, reimagine history from a subjective position, and manifest skin’s capacity to sustain our most intimate connections. Studio processes including cutting, kneading, sewing, knitting, carving, tracing and reassembling are deployed to further augment and reweave skin as an active, porous network enfolding a sense of self and connection to the world.
Many of the works were exhibited individually in other contexts and as such, are also documented in detail in other areas of this website.
For details of individual works, you can view or download the exhibition room sheet here. To view or download the short essay and list of acknowledgements that were published with the exhibition click here.
You can also email me to request a PDF copy of the PhD on the contact page of this website.
-Kate Just