This series of works was derived from my fascination with the values of transgression and exposure – here the writings of Foucault and his precursors, such as Georges Bataille, have informed me greatly. Erotcism, death, desire, ritual - our very hopes and fears – they are all known to us only through the limits of our knowledge, the taboos and those things considered abject by us.

Body art has always been linked to this spillage – spillage of the body (of identities manifest in it and projected onto it), its fluids and its workings in society; of art and the borders between it and life; of economy and the politics of its economy (as a site of labor and the laborius process of maintaining it as a site); and of the relationship between it and the various institutions that govern it (the body as the site where discipline is implemented and punishment is exacted). Where exactly are the lines between happiness and violence drawn on the body in its ever-expanding contemporary form(s)? The two concepts are after all not mutually exclusive – how can happiness and joy be known if not through the limiting filters of experienced-and- expected violence (both physical and mental)? More to the point, how can this invisible, ideological border be maintained and simultaneously rendered both knowledgeable and integral to living our lives ‘naturally’? And, how will this limit our lives and our experiences of it?

“…transgression and exposure are limiting concepts for both are already inextricably tied to the very conditions that render them knowledgeable. However they do form the crux of my artistic practice – without the values of transgression and the subsequent exposure of the limits of our knowledge (a process which is, as Foucault has argued, always in itself limited by its return to the limit once the action of transgression has been fulfilled), my work as an artist and art teacher cannot begin to function. However, I do not so much wish to draw attention to the act of transgression (and exposure) as to what it renders transparent: the processes of expansion and retraction that accompanies the moment of violation is present in everything that exists - it does not need ‘discipline’ or ‘morality’ to exist. (In fact quite the opposite, discipline and morality needs it to exist: without it there would be no need for discipline and at all). From all things ‘grand’ to those considered insignificant, they do not so easily fit the mold shaped by our limiting gaze. Whenever we are sure that we know something, that is when we must be most at our most vigilant. Knowledge is deceitful in that it will always attempt to render those things we whish to know in ways comprehensible to us only…one may say that the answers we seek are embedded in the questions we ask. When we let go of our longing for knowledge (and for meaning) we simply acknowledge that the experience of life is multiple, lways in flux and that all things are unified only in their inability to be understood by others as they are always in a process of transformation.”

(Interview with the artist/curator Alex Zika. This interview was printed in the catalogue for the show “Agora” held in London, 2004.)