Body, subject, other, thing: Drawing LEAPs

Leaky Embodiment Alter-ego Personas (LEAPs) are visions of tragicomic actors with bodies comprising bulbous, mismatched and ever-changing parts. Their portrayal is meant to challenge ideal notions of embodiment, particularly through envisioning an inherent and intensified otherness of the body, where ruptures occur between desire and empirical reality with respect to an ‘owner’s’ body. Conceived first through sketches, one LEAP figure was portrayed further as a 1:1 mixed-media relief. Two narrative voices – notes from the field by the artist and imagined dialogues between the artist and the LEAP – explore the perception of this process. The pairing of the two narratives exposes contradictions between artistic intentionality and effect. Drawing, whether as a trace with a ballpoint pen, scalpel or jigsaw, was a thread through the process of creation, with various effects ranging from delineating to unravelling. Drawing enacted a physical connection between the real and the imaginary, conflating the bodies of the creator and the depicted figure. Yet as the differing perspectives and evolving manifestations of embodiment in the narratives show, the actuality of bodies is not necessarily found in their facticity; how they feel and what they mean remains multivalent and shifting depending on positioning amidst differing subjectivities, circumstances and temporal frames. Drawing the LEAP’s body enabled traversals of dichotomies of subject/object, self/other and alien/familiar, complicating the assumed categories and opening ground for speculation of what a body could be and do.