Body Parts

For reasons I didn’t understand until decades later, a lot of the art I made as a teenager had missing body parts: gaping holes instead of eyes, people with unexplained missing limbs, or sculptures of disembodied fingers and toes. I’ve also long been fascinated by the science of phantom limbs, alien limbs, and delusions of bodily integrity. I taught a seminar about delusions at the University of Toronto. There’s a folder on my computer of articles from medical journals about phantom pain after mastectomy and phallectomy.

Rubber Hand Experiments

During my first postdoc, I was the resident philosopher in a perception lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics that did VR experiments. We did two variations of the rubber hand illusion. In the standard rubber hand illusion, the participant’s hand is hidden from view, and the experimenter strokes a visible rubber prop hand, while at the same time stroking the participant’s hidden hand. The coordination of visual and tactile stimulation can trick the brain (of about 1/3 of people) into feeling as though the obviously fake hand has become part of their body, replacing their own hand. In the experiment pictured below, the participants put on a VR headset and looked down to see an avatar that was either larger or smaller than their physical body. The experimenter would then gently stroke their arm or knee (using a motion sensor glove), while the participant saw the same motion happening on the avatar. This was the first experiment showing that people could take on a feeling of ownership of a different size body using VR. Other labs have followed up to develop treatments for body image disorders.

In the second experiment, I designed a variation in which there would be no visual stimulation at all; both the participant’s hand and the rubber hand would be hidden. Instead of inducing the illusion by seeing the stroking of the rubber hand, the illusion would be induced by the participant actively doing the stroking themself with their free hand, by controlling a brush with which they could explore the contours of the rubber hand by feel (while a coupled brush stroked their own hand). One motivation was to test whether this tactile version would work, as previous accounts of the illusion claimed that the effect worked because vision is dominant over proprioception. I didn’t buy it. Another motivation was that there is something a little uncomfortable about experimenters stroking participants’ arms and knees, plus if we wanted to develop at-home therapies, especially for body image issues involving more intimate body parts, it would be great for people to be able to induce the illusion on themselves. And it worked! See a demo of the setup below.

Dirty Pillows

I have also explored this fascination with disembodied body parts through art. Onya Hogan-Finlay, who curated the exhibition pictured at the top of the page, told me that everyone she knew in art school made either boob art or vagina art. Though I didn’t go to art school, I obviously went through that phase. The Dirty Pillows project began with a series of portrait photographs I took that depicted torsos with boobs, chopped off from the rest of the body in what several viewers described as a “clinical” style. While taking the pictures I asked some gentle questions about how the subject felt about that part of their body. Everyone seemed to have complicated feelings about their boobs. Shame was a common thread. As Jenny Sundén discusses in her article “On trans-, glitch, and gender as machinery of failure” the technology of gender is flawed: nobody–cis or trans–can succeed at femininity. In a series of needlepoint pillows, I recreated the photographs in faithful detail, accentuating each fold and shadow using increasingly inhuman colour palettes that make the viewer unsure of whether what they’re looking at is a slice of a human body or something abstract. The pillows are finished with velvet or satin backings, in the style of the hand-made needlepoint pillows in my mother and grandmother’s living rooms, to be displayed as proud tokens of (partially) successful femininity.

Tit Purse

From around 2001 – 2005 I ran a business called Deadpan Designs, where I sold handmade bags and accessories. Tit Purse was by far the biggest seller. It was the kind of thing that would make people stop in their tracks at craft fairs, then either laugh or scurry away looking at the floor. At my first such fair, someone with a more established business was selling cute vinyl pouches that looked like tightie-whities. Out of sheer envy of that idea, I took it one step further and started making these extremely simple items made from 4 circles of vinyl, a kernel of popcorn and a small zipper. They came in the 4 skin tones pictured here (nipple and areola colours varied), and 4 mostly unsystematic “cup sizes”.

The metaphorical meanings people read into Tit Purse were pretty wild. It was about capitalism’s effects on the body, how motherhood erodes privacy, the value of women’s bodies, bodily autonomy, body positivity, and so on. They were used to store nursing pads, given to babies as toys, and used for shock value. The author was truly dead, with the viewer fully taking control of determining meaning.

In 2004 Art Metropole included them in their annual Gifts by Artists sale of artist multiples, then acquired one for their collection. Unbeknownst to me, that whole collection was then acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, and in 2006 my Tit Purse ended up in an exhibition featuring a few dozen works from that collection, alongside pieces by very very famous people. I only found out that my career had peaked with Tit Purse late one night while googling myself. The moral of this story is that one should always choose the titles of one’s work with care. If only I had called it something grandiose and evocative like “Voice of Fire” I would not have to list what will probably be my most successful piece of art as “Tit Purse”.

Nipple Gate

In answer to the mystery of the missing or disembodied body parts in my earliest work, I finally got top surgery 25 years after first realizing that I had gender dysphoria. The Nipple Gate series depicts blinged out top surgery incisions in red embroidery, dripping with sequin blood, reminiscent of a costume worn by drag performer and costume designer Gottmik. They double as closed eyes, crying sparkly tears. Electing to undergo the pain of major surgery in order to feel more at home in your body is an equally complicated mix of pleasure-in-pain. It’s happy blood and/or tears of joy. In case these feelings aren’t complicated enough, the hospital stay offers plenty of reminders that most of the people getting mastectomies are facing down death, and will be traumatized by their loss. Plus, as my mother warned me, people are going to think I look weird.

The surgery involves cutting out an eye-shaped section of tissue around the nipple, then optionally grafting a reshaped nipple back on elsewhere, so the original nipple is part of the flap that is incinerated as medical waste. A gate is opened, then sewn shut, but the frame of the opening remains as a scar. The surgery is also a gateway to a new relationship with the body. There is no longer any risk of a taboo nipple slipping out, headlights showing under a thin t-shirt, excessive jiggling during exercise, bra straps showing, visible side boob, sports bra induced mono-boob, too much cleavage, too little cleavage, or any of the dozens of other ways in which boobs are constantly being accused of misbehaving (recall the impossibility of succeeding at femininity). There are, however, brand new ways that the technology of gender can malfunction. Shirts fit different. It is very unclear what would count as appropriate bathing attire. Entering a public bathroom is a newly fraught experience. And the angry incisions remain for a while, making my 12-year-old recoil in disgust. I think I may finally be done making boob art. (Technically, this last series depicts their absence.) Dick art is obviously the next step.