This is a documentation of the exhibition SKIN DEEP. Thanks for the great support of the Arts Council of Ireland Touring Award; Catherine Bowe, curator Wexford Arts Centre who guided this project beautifully; Éilís Murphy of @foldedleaf for her award-winning book on the exhibition; Dr. Yvonne Scott, Trinity College Dublin and Katherine Waugh, writer and film-maker for their insightful essays and conversations over the months, which have given me lots of food for thought - thank you all!

• The exhibition traveled to:

• Highlanes Gallery https://highlanes.ie/whats-on/exhibit...

• Limerick City Gallery of Art, where it was filmed, and

• Wexford Arts Centre, https://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/nati...

• https://www.wexfordartscentre.ie/skin...

The voiceover in this film is from my film of the same name SKIN DEEP. The film script is a collaboration with scriptwriter Olivia Fitzsimons @oneflawediris and the voiceover is by actor Sashi Rami, a total pleasure working with you both.

Essays commissioned for the exhibition SKIN DEEP.

An Alchemy of Appearance (excerpt). Yvonne Scott.

‘Skin Deep, an exhibition by Mary-Ruth Walsh, brings together a body of individual artworks that collectively present a cohesive, composite installation. The show focuses on the experience of the surface: both of human skin and of man-made surroundings (that is, the urban/built environment). The work evokes the tactility of experience, starting with touch and texture, extending to the senses of smell and sound aroused, for example, through contact with the newly-made – the particular scents of, say, new transport vehicles, printed media, or transit interiors.’

‘Walsh sees surgical intervention into the human body, and the discarding of those parts rejected, as a kind of death in the service of a concept of eternity (the preservation of the human body in an attempt to retain youthful form). The process represents an elegy, prompting a sense of loss rather than acceptance, or even celebration, of the stages through which the body proceeds.’

The Memory of Skin (excerpt). Katherine Waugh.

'Grafts were skin stories: a distant descendent of tattoos, an inbred cousin of braille. Before long, you could judge people’s worth and social class by the texture of their skin. The richest of us has skin like a great puffed up flesh palimpsest – graft upon graft, deep as third degree burns, healed in white-on-white curls, protrusions and ridges'.1

‘In Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, the human body struggles to maintain its fleshy singularity in a post-apocalyptic dystopia: bodies become atrophied into hairless, neutered, waxen surfaces embedded with data entry points. A defiant cult of self-mutilation emerges expressed through layers of grafts and ornate markings.’

‘Skin Deep presents a world seemingly on the threshold of such a dystopia – the relationship between the face, body and architecture forms a foundation upon which Walsh establishes her aesthetic exploration of the politics of surface; the pharmaceutically driven beauty industry’s fostering of a culture based on insecurity and narcissism is used as a trope to question how we might understand present-day interfaces between the human and built environment.’

1 Lydia Yuknavitch The Book of Joan, Harper Collins 2017

UPDATE:

Got some good news today from @foldedleaf.ie the limited edition, handmade book SKIN DEEP has been selected for the 100 Design Archive, a showcase of 100 best design projects from 2021 in Ireland.

The book by the wonderful @foldedleaf.ie It was a total pleasure working with Éilís Murphy bookmaker and Catherine Bowe curator. Thank you both for such commitment, there are literally months of work gone into this beautiful object. Here's the link to the book: Photography by Éilís Murphy https://www.100archive.com/projects/skin-deep and to buy it from folded leaf here’s the link https://maryruthwalsh.squarespace.com/config/pages

The above film documentation of SKIN DEEP was done by SandymountProductions, thank you Paraic English

Strangely Familiar Shades of Gray  (excerpt)

This film compares the interior of Eileen Gray’s house E.1027 to the interior of a camera. Both were designed as private creative spaces where light played an intrinsic part in both house and camera. The inventive ways the windows and shutters of E.1027 open and close to let in or reduce light in a measured way mirrors the camera shutter. Ideas of private interior space and camera space are played out in this film. The work alludes to several ideas and to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

Screened in IMMA as part of the Eileen Gray Retrospective, Dec 2013, for full film email maryruthodw@gmail.com

A material junkie! Come and visit my studio

Working in sculpture, film, drawing and photography, Mary-Ruth Walsh examines the relationship between human beings and the architectural world in a visit to her studio.