A Proposition

This project is built around the idea of the palimpsest as a metaphor for personal identity. Considering one’s self as beginning as a blank document, one’s lived experiences are constantly writing one’s identity onto oneself. However, as an individual one has the power to erase, rewrite, or reinforce what is written, resulting in the in the palimpsest described above.
This project will seek to visualize this metaphor by using the artist’s body as surface on which to write passages the artist has found relevant or meaningful to her experience and allowing time and selective editing on the part of the artist to alter her appearance over the duration of the piece’s existence.
From this piece I hope to gain a more comprehensive understanding of myself as an artist and as a human being. This work is a physical manifestation of my ideology in the sense of value which I place upon ideas these texts present and the dichotomy between the very abstract world of the ideas and the concrete world of the body. By both expressing this juxtaposition in a visual manner as well as living through the experience of being harshly and consciously judged for my appearance as person covered in tattoos rather than as a person presenting ideas I hope to gain a greater understanding of myself as a person and as one who practices the social dialogue which is art.