Having a Thick Skin

Holding Together gouache on paper 2021

Summer is in full tilt for 2021. Heat waves, droughts, floods. Irritated people on the vacation they missed out on last year. Virus cases rising again. I don’t know. It’s difficult to go about my day without being reminded in some way how we are lacking the basic instinct to take care of each other. That is sort of a side note to this week’s writing but also not really. 

I had written a whole blog post about identity last week. It has been occupying my mind lately. How we identify and who we identify with and why we need to label ourselves. I have even been exploring how our identity is often not a choice. Or we are not given the opportunity to explore our differences because we are boxed up and sent out in the world as a product of our upbringing. I decided though, I need more time to consider what it is I am trying to say about all of this. 

Instead I am going to write more specifically about what I have been working through these past couple of weeks in the studio. While my thoughts are still revolving around identity, the work I am doing right now is about skin. What we hide behind, wrap ourselves in, harden, break open. 

All of our selves, all of the matter that makes up our souls is wrapped in this thing called skin. It is considered an organ. Without it we would be dead. It is vital to our existence. Skin is not airtight though. It acts as an interface between what we hold inside and what is swarming outside ourselves. At the same time, we often use this “skin” as a carapace, shielding ourselves from internal as well as external pain. We criticise, adorn, celebrate, and even attach huge significance to the color. It is the organ that is directly and distinctly involved in our sense of touch. Every single one of us has it. 

Sometimes people are said to have thick skin. Meaning they can take the barbs of life more generously. This is obviously an act. It is also said that beauty can be skin deep. This obviously is an act as well. Skin is just one living breathing part of all the wondrous mysterious material that makes up our physical body. And all of our body is just one tiny part of the abstruse matter that makes up the universe. Thinking about it sets my mind in loops. But it’s true. We are all, all the parts of us, matter in the universe. That’s it. Nothing else. Just like every other thing. 

At the very same time, and the confounding aspect is that each configuration of matter that makes up “us” is entirely different from every other. Unique. Distinct. How we even manage to communicate with each other is hard to fathom. 

So, anyway, I have been working on paper. Or better put, I have been working with paper. Right now, I am seeing it as a metaphor for skin and the myriad of ways it interacts with the world. I am exploring ways this material absorbs or not, tears, scratches, punctures. Finding new ways to make marks, but also discovering ways to push the very substance of paper. To see what it can take. When does it lose its strength. When does it remarkably stay together. 

That’s it for now. Stay safe. Take care of each other and this beautiful planet. It’s all we have.