Churchie 2011
Title: Accoutrement
Medium: Perspex box, Cured and tanned salmon skin
Dimensions: 42 X 34 X 34 cm
Accoutrement is part of the New Skin series of sculptural and photographic works which continue Eisler’s interest in a post modern notion of human and animal physical transformation. Within an evolutionary and hybrid framework Eisler posits possible new physical manifestations and behaviour. The works encompass ideas of protection, display, pose, ritual and sexuality as part of an enquiry, which covers a wide spectrum of issues, from simple preservation mechanisms eg skins and exoskeletons, through primal sexual behaviour to fashion and contemporary museology. Whilst Eisler presents her work in both sculptural and photographic mediums, the photographs are extensions of her sculptural and installation practice.
The photographic works perform the sculptures, playing with ritual and the clichés of pose and display as the body merges with the darkness and the totemic and masquerading objects. The sculptures comprise skins of salmon formed into head gear and masks, tools for a kind of shape shifting and anamorphism. The works are both beautiful and dangerous, doll like and embalmed. Accoutrement sits somewhere between museum display and fashion iconography; capture and pose; and the past and present. Is it a prescient reminder of war and death or of the possibility of the development of a more highly sensitised being?
As an object it speaks of the absent body – both the human host and the trace of the former animal, without giving precedence to either. It is an unsettling image that undermines the drive towards anthropomorphism and speaks of reconnection with the animal, and a pantheistic reverence for Nature but also of our fears of the unknown and of a future world.
