Saturday, December 6, 2008

The Communion of Flesh

Practically anyone can go to a Cash-Mart in this country and buy just about anything they need cheaply and in great quantity. We're spoiled on it, and it rots the concept of value a bit. Some of the nice things about leather wear is that it's not cheap and it's not run-of-the-mill everywhere. Leather goods are designed for special purposes that cater to a need to jar our lives out of the 21st century worker-drudge mundane.

Yet there are morally complicated aspects to the medium as well. Moreso than many vegetable or mineral goods leather comes directly from the expiration of a living being. Nature has evolved an awesomely orchestrated ecosystem where nothing goes to waste. The lesser carnivores consume the herbivores which in turn subsist off the vegetable matter of the Earth. They in turn are preyed upon by greater carnivores which in the end expire only to be reintegrated by the soil and decomposers. Matter transforms, petrifies, changes shape into or out of energy and transcribes various states of being.

As omnivores with the capacity for abstract thought the human race is capable not only of taking the actions necessary for survival but for making the choices to effect or to not effect our ecosystem. We can choose to not eat meat. We can choose to hunt for sport. We can choose to transform alloy into metal, sand into glass, uranium into radiation, sound into art. We can choose to waste or facilitate renewal.

Our mere existence demands an interaction with our environment. A relationship. Life persists only through the integration of other life: an adage that requests parallel interpretations when relating to a lion devouring the flesh of a lamb for survival from the incorporation of a Shakespearean plotline as part of the side quest in a massively-multiplayer online video game. As in Nature what survives is needed and reflects a grain of the precedents which contributed towards it. Like Religion. So too Art.

Because of the remarkable properties of skin it stands out among mediums. Living flesh can heal or scar. Pierced, it can recover. Tattooed it is a canvas. Rife with sensations and nerve endings detecting pleasure and pain it is a living network of information and awareness. Heat, cold, soft, serrated, caustic, slimy, parchment, motion, raw and in great subtleties. We read the world through our skin, detecting slight changes in how a thing feels and associating experience with understanding.

Skin that has been severed, changed, transformed from a living extension to independent being bears grains of its history. Removed from the renewing processes of life it becomes a relic of experience. Each mark is remembered, each knife cut made manifest. Where the needle punctures will always be a hole, where the wine spills will always be a stain. Skin that has become more than just living skin has transcended its own existence; become a time script; become legend; become artifact.

That is why working with Leather and Flesh to me are sacred things; to direct one's energies on it is a spiritual act; to manifest its change is to touch the divine. When we mark the world we mark our legacy. To take something wherein exists a touch of life and choose to invest our energies into it facilitates not only its own being but a new existence: a harmony of communion; the prodigy of Life.

From our own lives comes new life. That is our legacy. This is my Art.

About Me

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A self-trained leather artisan, I have studied both locally and abroad earning degrees in Psychology, Arts & Technology. My work brings over a decade of creative study from a range of fields spanning dramatic and musical performance to sculpture, animation, film and storycrafting. My primary mediums of focus are chalk (street paintings) and leather (carving, design & construction). At its core my work infuses flow and sensuality with abstraction and narrative.