Katie Lewis – needle body mapping

Visual artist Katie Lewis is doing rather impressive body and sentiments mapping with pins, thread and a pencil… the results are quite impressive…

Katie Lewis: 201 Days, pins, pencil, thread (c)

Katie Lewis received her B.A. from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. In 2006, she was awarded the Barclay Simpson Award for outstanding graduate work at California College of the Arts. She has also been granted two residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. She lives and works in San Francisco. (bio taken from Stanford University)

Katie Lewis: Tangled Pathways, pins, enamel, thread (c)

‘My current work traces experiences of the body through methodical systems of documentation, investigating chaos, control, accumulation and deterioration. The artificially rigid organization of my materials alludes to control– of the individual body as an institutional domain, and of irrational experience as a manageable, concrete set of events.’

Katie Lewis: 201 Days, pins, pencil, thread (c)

‘My choice to use the body as a starting point aims to give visual form to physical sensations that are invisible to the eye and medical imaging, and only exist in the subjecetive realm. I collect data through daily documentation processes, and then generate numerous systems to allow the information to exist in a material form. I abstract and quantify the data in order to give authority and agency to subjective experiences.’

Katie Lewis: 201 Days, pins, pencil, thread (c)

‘The work alludes to the body in certain pieces, through the text or a particular material, but the reference remains abstracted. By abstracting and codifying the work, I want to evoke a sense of the passing of time, accumulation of information, presence and absence, chaos and order, control and loss of control and the possibility of the system collapsing upon itself or reaching a breaking point.’

Katie Lewis: Accumulated Numbness, pins, enamel, pencil (c)

‘Once I devise a system for a particular piece, I follow it all the way through the work allowing the visual results to exist outside of subjective expressive decisions. By strictly following and never veering from a given system, the work is tightly controlled and asserts itself as accurate and authoritative (however false and unscientific), questioning the gap between a subjective experience and medicine’s conventions for understanding the body.’

Katie Lewis: Process of Accumulation, pins, pencil, thread

‘The work is often organized into grid-like charts and diagrams mimicking science and medicine’s representations of the body as a specimen, visually displayed for the purpose of gaining knowledge. In this way I create distance from the information and objectify the experience, giving a false sense that the body is accessible and easily understood.’

(Source: See-ming Lee’s Friendfeed via Datavisualization)