what if the baby were a map (1996)
tache: noun: A mark, a strange impression that spoils something... Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie.
Georges Buffon’s engraving after Jacques de Sève, A Black Albino Child from L’Histoire de l’homme, 1749.
Piebald skin roughs up neat definitions (black/white). Is it good luck to touch people with birthmarks? Superstition: ‘the longing mark’ as the materialisation of the pregnant woman’s unrealised cravings, a map of her desire.
The child’s body mapping maternal desire, but all the body’s surface is also a personal history of things spoiled and fixed. Repetition, seriality, sameness and difference. How to think the intractable problems (aesthetic, dermatologic and above all racial and taxonomic) of the nègre blanc, and what is a marked body?Based on Georges Buffon’s engraving after Jacques de Sève, A Black Albino Child from L’Histoire de l’homme, 1749.
100 drawings, each in pen and ink and watercolour on 300g Arches paper, 295 x 205mm.
Exhibited in solo show at Gadfly Gallery, Perth, Western Australia, 1997
