Ghislaine Fremaux

"I am concerned with a portrayal of people and their bodies that is ethical and visceral. My drawings are experimental ruminations on embodiment and intimacy. My process and its yield query the intersubjective encounter, and the skin and gaze that mediate it. 

Skin is the envelope and the extent of a body; it is the liminal membrane that passes between self and other. Despite its conferral and receipt of touch, skin is the body's insoluble and terminal limit. At immense heights and widths, I draw the bodies of my friends and partners excruciated and vivified by skin. 

Subjects must invite me to draw them, and are not posed or otherwise instructed. The drawing registers my attempt to fathom our encounter. I parse my subject's body in brittle chalk, applied tenderly with the fingers, and fossilize it there under high-gloss resin. The scale and unstable paper ground testify to the intractability of seeing and knowing a body, and intend to the deploy the piece not as an image, but as an event, itself."

work photographed: Skin of Years: Nudism & the Aging Body, 2017