For some artists it is very natural to use the physical body – often their own bodies (think about Cindy Sherman...) – as the main medium to make their voices heard and bring their messages forward.
This can be a very personal way to make art as the body becomes a living sculpture, a canvas or an installation. Besides, in this way the artist directly relates to the audience, without using any other medium, and the relationship between artist and viewer becomes the final artwork. Among the artists operating in this way there is Japanese Mari Katayama.
Katayama's photographs mainly feature herself, often wearing or surrounded by the things she has made and collected throughout the years, and the images tell a very personal story.
Her body is indeed her main "material" and inspiration: Katayama was born with tibial hemimelia, a rare congenital disorder affecting the shin bones (and, in her case, her left hand) and chose to have her legs amputated when she was nine years old. After the operation she spent a year learning to walk with artificial limbs.
Katayama often poses in her small room crammed with prosthetic legs, hand-made clothes, embellished cushions and her body doubles.
There is a fashion and textile component in her work as well since, as a child, Katayama had to wear shoes buckled to her legs with braces, and she couldn't therefore wear ordinary clothes.
Her great grandmother, grandmother and mother made her clothes and her personal needs and dreams of being able to wear glamorous designs prompted her to learn how to sew when she was 3 or 4.
At the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice there are two spaces dedicated to Katayama's works, one in the Arsenale and another in the Giardini's Central Pavilion.
The former features a sort of altar to Katayama: one main mage of the artists - the self-portrait entitled "Shell" (2016) and taken using a shutter release with a long extension cable - takes centre stage.
In this image the artist is surrounded by hand-sewn life-size dolls, while behind her there are jars filled with bits and pieces from her sewing, sweet wrappers and plants preserved in salad oil.
The self-portrait hangs on the wall, while in front of it there is a table covered with Katayama's artefacts, a jumble of tattooed prosthetic legs, soft fabric bodies covered in tulle and decorated with lace, shells, pearls, beads and crystals, works she originally created not as art, but mainly out of amusement.
The portrait is surrounded by further powerful photographs such as "I have child's feet" and "I'm wearing little high heels", with the artist posing in her outgrown prosthetic legs and pre-amputation leg braces.
The Giardini section revolves around photography with Katayama outside of her room and in open spaces, but with her body covered in her fabric doubles.
Some of the images included here were inspired by a visit to the island of Naoshima, in the Seto Inland Sea of southern Japan. Here the artist discovered the Naoshima Onna Bunraku, an all-female style of bunraku or puppet theatre in which puppeteers use their hands to manipulate the dolls.
Katayama took pictures of the women's hands, printed them on fabric and employed the material to make a soft tentacular sculpture that she wears in some of these images.
Hands are a recurring motif in her work as proved by the photographs in which she creates a swan-like shadow on a wall with her cleft hand that in other images looks like a crab's pincers (that's why the crab is also a recurring motif in her work).
There is one main point to take into consideration while contemplating Katayama's works: the artist conceives her body as a living sculpture that allows her to tackle themes of identity and of performing different roles in her own play. Katayama's photographs and artefacts are indeed not ways to create art out of her disabilities, but they represent a positive affirmation - all bodies are beautiful.
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