Alix Marie

"In the proximity and detail of skin, it’s grain, palette and pores an intimate and privileged vision of the other, a vision of bottomless desire to “know” his flesh, consume its “inconsumability”, its excess, consume “the real” it promises and become real too through this ungoverned act. The artist and her lover, archetypal like a visceral, abject “Eros and Psyche” as imagined by the angel of history.

But in the colossal boulders, both vulnerable and flesh-like and veined stone, another myth is invoked, that of Sisyphus and his infinite task, but here hero is conflated, flesh and object becoming one, but here also hero is heroine, and here her task is one of forever constructing and realising her lover.
An undying monument to the transcendent toil of creating this lover, a faceless, anagrammatic mound of flesh, a surface upon which to project all dreams, trauma, feverish and inchoate desire."    Tai Shani

This is carried out mostly through my experience of my own female body and my perception of the bodies that surround me; here the one I have the most intimate relationship to, the one with my lover Orlando.
The installation is composed of large-scale prints of close-up body parts of Orlando. The photographs have been dipped in wax, crinkled, scanned and reprinted, resulting in a trompe-l’oeil effect, skin trying to break open and escape itself. 

The cracked wax resembles marble, the marble of meat and the marble of classical sculptures. Orlando in Virginia Woolf’s novel blurs gender boundaries, a character that turns from male to female.
Orlando is a story of our genders melting and merging together.

Orlando is a large-scale photographic paper prints installation.

My practice has always been concerned with the crossing and mixing of photography and sculpture practices. I am interested in the photograph as object and its potential for materiality, touch, and three-dimensionality.

Orlando comes from an investigation of how to represent intimacy, those moments where the other’s body is blown up through proximity and every detail of the skin and body unravels. I have always felt teased by the similarities between skin and the photographic print: both surfaces, both fragile, both ungraspable.

Olivier Richon talks about the relation between orality and photography and thinks of the camera as closer to the mouth than the eye. There is something cannibalistic in the nature of love, a desire for incorporation. It is expressed in Orlando through the juxtaposition of photography, a shapelessness of the body, and flesh resembling meat amassed in a monumental pile.