Marion Harper

Painting is a method of making that affirms my own life, as well as helping me to confront the inevitable forces that claw and pester at its edges. From my early confrontation with broken bodies on a remote mountain to medical training during the Aids epidemic, this project has been about forming, dissolving and reforming ideas about what it means to be embodied. Recently, a close friend experienced a life-changing event that threw him into re-evaluating the certainties of his corporeal being in the world. By looking at the unstable nature of embodiment, I ask, where does a body begin and where does it end? How are bodies limited and entangled with their environments? I have sought painterly ways to respond to these questions and to discover new ways of unsettling existing modes of looking and thinking about bodies.