Surfaces and skins may represent impenetrable barriers or boundaries for our physicality yet are easily penetrable by our vision.  While we all perceive our reality as external the actual business of vision or sight takes place inside our heads in much the same way as a photograph takes shape inside our camera.

Knowing this fact allows visual artists to play with our mechanism of vision to persuade our senses of the impossible.

From asphalt to ice.

 Notice how no one is willing to test the hypothesis that the road surface is definitely still there!

The real value of art such as this is to lead us to question and become more aware of the active role we play in coding our reality.  It also illustrates how our vision works in concert with our other senses to regulate our interaction with our environment.

On another level these pieces are a powerful demonstration of the power of art.  Of how art can literally force us to see something that is not there physically, yet our bodies and minds, our deepest instincts,  beg to differ. 

The manipulation of the light signature of the surface i.e. art, provokes a reaction within our minds that in effect influences us to see beyond the surface, replacing it with an entity that causes changes in our perception of and interaction with our environment, which illustrates our subjectivity in constructing our reality, and the plasticity of the superficial.

 Gotham City?

 This is powerful visual art, but all art in effect takes us beyond the surface.  Books, music, photography open windows which allow us to see what we will see. 

Reality or illusion?

Who decides?

Hi there! 

Welcome to the new skindeepawareness blog.

This is where we examine all the latest issues relating to skin decoration and culture on the web.

Our definition of skin is the broadest possible one, not limiting ourselves to the surface of human skin alone, but exploring organic and non-organic skins, surfaces; i.e. the decoration of buildiings and the urban environment by artists such as Banksy.

In some sense every skin is a surface and every surface a skin; it is one of the oldest of human motivations to decorate and embellish the surface, as witnessed by the earliest and most evocative cave art from areas as diverse as France and the deserts of Namibia.

Lascaux cave art - France

Cave art - Namibia

The drive to drive to decorate and transform surface seems to be hard wired into humanity and in a sense does not require formal tuition in order to be accessible to expression, as every culture around the world it seems, has managed to develop their own unique ouvre, in the majority of cases without what we in the west would understand as formal training.  

And it must not be forgotten that mother nature herself is the greatest designer of all.

She seems to take as much pleasure in combining colours and textures in her designs as any of us mere mortals do.

Enjoy!