Figure Study in Light by Paul Holmes

Holmes, Paul

Abstract

To make this artwork, the artist was measured by a tailor as if for a suit of clothes. These dimensions were translated into an installation of LED tubes suspended in a darkened room, forming the same shape in light that the tailor’s measuring tape made around the artist’s body.

The half-suggestion of a human in these light forms recalls the stick and circle figures of a child’s sketch, or cultural icons the Michelin Man and the Saint – forms that conflict with the musculature of the “hegemonic male ideal” (Adams, Turner and Bucks, 2005) that shapes many men’s body anxieties.

Tailored clothes flatter by hiding the realities of the figure to make the body fit contemporary notions of male identity, shape and proportion, and, historically, the lounge suit became fashionable by association with the masculine pursuit of sports (Anderson, 2000). The measuring process clients go through, is, by contrast, unflattering: Reducing them to cold and unforgiving geometric data – mathematical vital statistics that cannot be disguised.

Echoing this, the light elements in the work are exploded like a scientific diagram: strewn around the space, rather than being arranged to form a human shape; the figure cannot be recognized as whole from any single perspective. Heinrich (2012) writes that body art works are only fully realized when the spectator brings their own theoretical and emotional perspectives to it. Here, the viewer must move around the work and rely on memory to assemble a full picture of this symbolic outline body. The image we have of it, like that we have of our own bodies, is an illusion that bears only a subjective and superficial relationship to reality.

Citation

Holmes, P. (2019, July). Figure Study in Light by Paul Holmes. Presented at Progressive Connexions: Storytelling and the Body, Verona, Italy

• Presentation Conference Type: Speech
• Conference Name: Progressive Connexions: Storytelling and the Body
• Conference Location: Verona, Italy
• Start Date: Jul 15, 2019
• End Date: Jul 16, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jun 23, 2020
• Keywords: Body, Masculinity, Tailoring, Light, Art, Figure
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2657895
• Related Public URLs: https://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/storytelling/storytelling-and-the-body/project-archives/1st/