Sovereignty/ Heterogeneity

Leith School of Art Graduate Artists Residency Final Show at Customs House Gallery, June 2022. The exhibition showcased the outcome of a year long residency based in the building.

This project focused on the naturalization of the state's borders/body through disciplinary mechanisms and was inspired by the location of the residency in the former Customs and Excise building- a space where the economic past and present of Edinburgh converge.

For this body of work, I was concerned with questions about exchange and insecurity within the larger mechanics of capitalism and globalization. My starting point was found texts from medical journals describing the violation of the body’s borders. I found an interesting mirroring in the historical descriptions of the adjacent Firth of Forth, an inlet which open Edinburgh up to the North Sea, and its islands- specifically Inchkeith. The island has been used for fortification, quarantine, and in 1493 became the site of an unusual language deprivation experiment.

The metaphor of the body as the state/corpus is a central image, which has been deployed to explore the use of diseases to define border spaces as unstable zones of contamination that threaten the integrity of the symbolic order and unity within.

From top:

Fig 1. Photographic screenprint of the Seven Sisters coastline, the borderline which delineates the threshold of English sovereignty, exhibited alongside a found fragment of the coastline, and a 3D print of a microscopic section of the skin.

Fig 2. Research room from the exhibition comprising of “maps” of the body.

Fig 3. A photograph taken from Portobello, looking out towards Inchkeith Island, and a cargo ship.

Fig 4. Inchkeith Island from Portobello (Feb, 2023). A local myth of twin babies moored in the island by Kind James iv for a strange language experiment in 1493 resonated with themes of body and contamination I was exploring this year. Allegedly, the king was keen to test the theory that devoid of the contamination of linguistic contact, the twins would revert back to an “uncorrupted” originary language.

Fig 5. Research collage images of two postcards. The first depicts the seven-headed 'Beast of the Ocean' from an illuminated medieval bestiary next to a photo of oil rigs in the North Sea. The figure of the beast is from the Biblical Revelations, commonly depicted wearing a crown, and is often evoked within anarchist discourse as it alludes to the limits of the state and sovereign authority.