Skin

Skin is inspired by the many years I spent in the world of quarries, stone and sculptors. I visited the marble quarries around Carrara for years, concentrating mainly on the quarries and the landscape. But of course, being in surroundings that is known for its remarkably subtle and beautiful stone, one meets other artists that spent their lives working with hammer and chisel, bringing out the forms they have in mind or see hidden in the piece of stone they have chosen to work with.

As a photographer I have used my cameras, film, paper and chemistry to do something equal. I asked my muse (my wife at the time) to sit and lie on the stone so that I could photograph her body in combination with the marble surfaces.

In certain cases, I chose to double-expose my negative so that the body would be depicted ín the stone rather than ón the stone; in later variations I used photoshop to achieve similar effects. In the quarries I also found many examples of the skin of the mountain being almost human in touch, sometimes bruised and damaged by the work that took place in the process of excavation. It made clear to me why marble is used by many sculptors as the stone of choice to shape the human body