SECOND SKIN: STRAIGHTJACKET AND PARKA
GARMENTS, 2013
JANE PROPHET (UK)
For twenty-five years Jane Prophet was the unwilling recipient of hundreds of letters, from two words to a hundred pages long. All have been written to, and about her by a delusional stalker diagnosed as suffering from psychosis. Jane’s three artworks in TRAUMA are driven by this experience as she feels compelled to understand his state of mind.
The parka form was chosen because this was the coat worn by the stalker when he attempted to abduct the artist. Holding her tight to his chest, he dragged her down a busy London street until people fought him off. The concept of a second skin is common to a range of clothing-related fetishes. The garment acts as a fetishistic surrogate or replacement for the wearer’s own skin — a second skin. Here, the parka and the straitjacket each provide a ‘super-stimulus’, something that is more intense than the normal response associated with real skin.
In online spaces ‘second-skin’ describes the act of donning a virtual or simulation of the human form. By putting on our second skins we become someone different. The two garments are bespoke tailored. As the artist has said, “If I wear these garments I become the stalker. When he wears them he is closer to me. These two garments fit like a second skin.”
BIO:
Jane Prophet is a British artist who works across media and disciplines to produce objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. She often collaborates with life scientists: stem cell researchers, mathematicians and heart surgeons to radically re-envisage the human body. Prophet also makes works that analyse our experience of contemporary landscapes, such as the animation Decoy (2001) and the photographic work The Landscape Room (2001) that combine images of real and algorithmic landscapes. Her ten year interest in 3D printing began with Model Landscapes (2005) that includes miniature trees 3D-printed from mathematical data. She spent 2015 working with neuroscientists making work about art, meditation and death.