Ainsley Wilcock
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Grotesquing Bodily Traces
My work is concerned with the grotesque as it relates to the body trace. Relying on the interaction and co-presence of humour, horror, play and terror, excess and sparsity, my art fuses the grotesque aesthetic with seemingly incongruous categories of images and forms. Clothing and unstable bodily materials provide transient territories to explore ideas of presence and absence.
I am drawn to the grotesque as a category that emerges when established boundaries are compromised; pulled into a liminal space. The grotesque generates deformation and monstrosity in the coming together of what should be kept apart; the sense that something is illegitimately in something else. In my work grotesque images or objects fuse and confuse form, breaking down physical and psychological boundaries that might be applied to understanding the liminal space of the body—its surface and exterior boundaries—through clothing, skin, hair, sweat and sebum all of which are transient and prone to change. Traces are residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous yet also material entities.
I am interested in how a grotesque aesthetic and image tradition has often been one of excess. My drawings are intricate yet minimal in both subject matter and composition. Working on a scale that related to the body I often allow for gaping human sized voids in my drawings. My interest in absence in relation to the body and the corporeal trace leads me to consider whether it is possible for the grotesque to be found in sparsity; in an absence. In a sense my practice involves testing the elusive threshold or boundaries of the grotesque through subtle and shifting contexts of corporeal manifestations and traces. I wish to question the limits of the grotesque; where it begins and at what point it ceases to be. A grotesque examination of the body trace poses the question the self and the other; the body beyond itself; the body that betrays itself.
The grotesque relationship to presence and absence can also found in the shadow play and puppety, muppety natures of my subject matter. Shaggy, feathery, leathery, animalistic clothing and skin-like materials rendered into exaggerated, anthropomorphic forms intend to evoke a haunting yet absurd combination. In my drawings and sculptural installations I have drawn from some traditions in grotesque art aesthetics that have historically combined human, animal, plant and architectural imagery into strange and incongruous hybrid creatures. I am similarly interested in the Theatre of the Grotesque—or rather its visual ploys and manifestations—as an extension of both the grotesque and a play on notions of what is real and not real, through extravagance and exaggeration and at the same time disquiet absences.
Transgression of the bodies’ boundaries through the deliberate and incidental shedding of the body is key to my work. I propose that the boundary of the body is grotesque in essence; where it is at play. Conception of what constitutes the ‘self’, the ‘other’—or something rendered ‘other’—is determined by degrees at this boundary or threshold of the body. Frankensteinian in practice and subject matter, I tend to refer to my work as a series of composites, in that they allow for potential, simultaneous readings and associations. Is the form innocuous and empty; haunted and disquieting; human, inhuman or subhuman; animate or inanimate; fabric or flayed skin; sexual or sexless? In this way I aim to bring to light this confusion inherent to the grotesque.
One direction of my work has been to explore how the grotesque is best understood by what it does, not what it is. The grotesque serves my art not only as an aesthetic category but also as a methodology. I am interested in an understanding of the body as transforming and unconfined; imprinted and imprinting upon. Through a combination of drawing and ‘con/fusing’, trace-making practices I refer to my art practice as ‘grotesquing’.
To practice grotesquing is to see the grotesque manifest through action: to exist not only in the trace, but also in the making of that trace. By implementing the grotesque as a methodology, I intend for my art to allow for a new perspective on drawing and subsequent practices in my art. These ideas and investigations into the grotesque inform the basis of my research practice into the grotesque as how it relates to bodily traces.
2016
imprint on faux fur on stretchers
40.6 x 40.6 cm
2016
imprint on performance velvet on stretchers
40,6 x 40.6 cm
2016
imprint on faux suede on stretchers
91.4 x 61 cm
2016
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
I acknowledge the Dharawal people as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which I was born, live, and work. I pay respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.