This education kit was produced for the 2015 exhibition Body parts . It presents a selection of focus works from the exhibition along with issues for consideration for students in Years 10 -12.

Click on an image for more information (including medium and dimensions) and to view the work in the Gallery collection.

All photographs, however real they appear to be, involve radical transformations through scale, dimensionality, cropping and framing. The photographed body can be subjected to or participate in an infinite number of transformations and reconfigurations. Body parts indicates some of these possibilities.

Body parts features over 20 photographs by 19 Australian and international artists from the Gallery’s photography collection. It encompasses four overlapping themes: the performative, earthy, fertile body; the body in extremis; the classical body; and the abject body. Fragmented perspectives on the human form have become increasingly commonplace since the advent of the camera. Photography’s ability to communicate the extent of the body and its metaphors is played out here.

The flattening of form through the photographic plane allows for abstraction from the familiar and the enhancement of imaginings. The body is more than it is normally described to be – it may seem headless yet is alive, have contorted or isolated limbs, possess extraordinary musculature, or become the site of dreams and fears. Photography makes the body completely malleable – a contradiction given the inherently static nature of the medium.

Questions

Artists can make works that deal with emotional and psychological states, personal commitments and obsessions. How have the artists in this exhibition transformed the human body to explore some of these ideas?

Using the human form as your subject, create a body of work showing movement and/or stillness. Consider the emotional impact your artwork will convey.

Simone Mangos’s work from the mid 1980s was poetic and lyrical. Her use of honey, with its intense allusions to mythology and luxury, was highly sensuous. This photograph formed part of an installation titled Well, which referred to sleep, dreaming, and generation ‒ with honey representing as rich a life force as the earth. These honey-coated arms can be seen as rooted in primordial matter, able to create in the same way that the mind can give rise to dreams of infinite richness and possibility.

These photographs are representative of Douglas Holleley’s final student works at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. During this time Holleley’s technical interest was to introduce colour into black-and-white photographs. He also sought to transpose his own lived experience into a documentation of the metaphysical. The strong use of contrast in the images creates a visual paradox. They oscillate between a visualisation of the process of reproduction and an ominous sense of ‘mortal danger’. The viewer must make the decision to see the ‘basic building blocks’ of life or ‘truncated body parts … with a fragile grip on life’.

As inviting as Jane Burton’s nude may look at first glance, it is ambiguous in both its nudity and what it may represent. She does not shy away from confronting the display of female sexuality and what it may mean in this photograph. The figure becomes a vessel with flesh representing a fluid boundary between interior and exterior worlds. The leafless branches and fine decoration that cover the skin of the subject only serves to heighten the encounter between internal strength and external malevolence.

Lynn Davis revels in the realist fragment in her approach to photographing the body. She said in 1985 that she likes keeping the final image ‘on the level of the sensuality of shapes and forms’. She asks her subjects to push the body beyond its limits so that beauty and excitement can be exaggerated. Davis worked with dancers to explore these limits in the present series. She asked for extreme discipline in movement, the formation of shapes, contrasts and physical tensions which she found exhilarating in their abstractions.