This is a small selection from the Webskin series. It is a development form the Finger webs which I did by myself when collecting webs and used my point and shoot camera.

For these Mel Grant and I visited a friend of Mels here in Birmingham, Laura Hunt who has a copious amount of spider webs in her garage.I wanted to see if I could improve on the Finger Webs series with the help of a better camera. I also wanted to try out placing webs between joints like my elbow.

All photographs taken by Melissa Grant.

IN a couple of emails I wrote

I rather like the girly delicacy of them - although I don’t want to make Cocteau Twins album covers - I don’t want to loose any bite!

I do like the suggestion of stocking tops, the hairs on my skin which mimic the hairs on the spiders and all of that stuff about hairy femininities, - you know how glossy and super airbrushed mainstream super femme body is, so I like the up too close and personal of the saggy skin of my body and the saggy skin of the webs on it.

Surfaces layers. it makes me think about an Oz based artist Paul Thomas talking about those covert spaces inbetween body and clothing. I like the idea of them being set against the profound beauty and implicit violence of the egg/embryo and the holding technologies of the cable ties. Like riffling though a private chest of drawers in someones bedroom and finding unexpected transmorgrifying indeterminant objects in the discreet domestic, maybe if Cronenburg met Angela Carter. We did the shoot at Mels’ friend Lauras’ who is a secondary school teacher. She is currently marking essays that touch on the gothic, so we were discussing Dracula and Angela Carter of whom she is a big fan (as am I). So it was rather lovely to have these literary conversations and references of the mutable and destabilised against the performing of those concepts.

I’m also reminded of the web being an extension of the spiders tactile zone, it’s delicate hairs sense the threads movements as they vibrate and move. The hairs on my arms function similarly but are amplified with the extreme delicacy of the webs and the cold that creates goose bumps and erect hair follicles. This working with layering and spanning on my own skin creates an extended meshing of these ideas of super fine touch and a distributed sense of self and selfing, both entirely responsive and entirely indivisible  from my environment. Felt textures and textual feelings  form a inter and intra mergings.

The punning on felt is another story. Mel, who is a great crafts person and makes alot of felt,  has suggested we try and create some felt with spider silk.

I posted these images onto Facebook where there is a very lovely circulation of thoughts, support and resonance between my work and that of UK based artist Liz Atkin, and US based academic, theorist and writer Eva Hayward and I.

fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

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