Artist Feature: Ariana Page Russell
Her skin, her medium. Her skin, the canvas.
From the Artist:
A body is an index of passing time. Skin protects us as it shows shifting bones, bruising, muscles loosening and tightening, and freckles and wrinkles forming. I think of this as a transient fashion of skin, including the revealing way a blush decorates one’s cheek, freckles form constellations on an arm, or hair creates sheen on skin’s matte surface.
My skin is very sensitive and I blush easily. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s immune system releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the hypersensitive skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw on my skin with just enough time to photograph the results. Even though I can direct this ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much like the uncontrollable nature of a blush.
I also make wallpaper and collage with photographs of my skin cut into decorative designs, then attached to the wall or onto board. I use these collages to decorate my skin by scanning the patterns and making them into temporary tattoos. Then I place the tattoos back on my body as an additional layer for the fashion of skin. The tattoos are red and pink shades of sensitivity so I can adorn myself with a longer lasting, intentional welt or blush. Some of the tattoos also go on a wall, mirror, or window after they’ve made contact with my body, leaving traces of cells and hair, and holding a record of skin’s map.
Recently I started working with inkjet transfer paper to print my photographs on a different surface. I use water to get the transfer to stick to a sheet of paper, and when the ink runs off in the process it resembles a watercolor painting, translucent yet still retaining some of the image I began with.
The sensitivity of my skin is transparency too—what shows up on the surface reflects what’s going on inside. All of my work in the last 12 years has been about this capacity of skin to reveal internal happenings, and how permeable that makes us.
Rather than being frustrated by my skin’s transparency, I claim it by making art in the crimson hues that reveal my vulnerability.
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Ariana Page Russell creates images that explore the skin as a document of human experience, using her own hypersensitive flesh to illustrate the ways we expose, express, adorn and articulate ourselves. Russell has exhibited nationally and internationally and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. her work has been featured in several publications including The Atlantic and Wired. She received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2005. She is also the author of Skintome, a website about skin and creativity.