Matthew PERKINS
Prick

The work Prick has developed from a number of influences. Firstly, there is an interest in exploring the gendering of actions or behaviours and materials and how these elements contribute to masculine and feminine identity. This exploration has been initiated by Judith Butler’s questioning of ‘the assumption of normative heterosexuality: those punitive rules that force us to conform to hegemonic, heterosexual standards for identity.’

Secondly, there is a sense of endurance – a sustained action – which brings focus to the body as site for defining the physical and mental self. For the viewer this prolonged act gives way to an empathetic agony and thus evolves into a dialogue between the artist and the viewer relating to the body and self, subject and object, being and non-being. Existential anxiety manifests itself in the deed of narcissism. The transference of pins from one mound to another responds to the notion of psychological repression and thus the symbolic act becomes both a cathartic and transformative.

Art theorist Lea Vergine describes such acts:

Once the productive forces of the unconscious have been liberated, what follows is a continuous and hysterical dramatization of the conflicts between desire and defense, license and prohibition, latent and manifest content, memory and resistance, castration and self-conservation, life impulses and death impulses, voyeurism and exhibition, impulses towards sadism and masochistic pleasure, destructive fantasy and cathartic fantasy. A search for psychotic symptoms would lead our attention to the aspects of the work connected to dissociation, melancholy, delirium, depression, and persecution manias.