Watch, Listen, Read

Showcase: Claire O’Keefe

Selected as one of the five showcases from the Annual submission entry on fashion and style, Claire O'Keefe details the last decade of her life, through the story of her melanoma.

Piel
This project is a bitacora of my skin. Each image is composed by various layers that abstractly link to different issues related to mystery and my mother’s. But also with the ideas behind the surfaces of our world of images. 
Like the layers of the epidermis I explore through various issues of what happened to my skin ten years ago. I was diagnosed with a melanoma and I had to have surgery on my left arm.  
I relate the burning action of the sun on the skin with analogical errors, mistakes occasioned by light on the negative. 
The use of vernacular images from erotic calendars or playing cards and collages of old pictures of my mother sunbathing in Majorca in 1971 (the year she left England for good to live in sunny Spain) lead me to interweave my personal story with the cultural context of Spain in the seventies.  
My mother landed there a few years before the Destape, a moment that refers to Spanish transition of social habits through the arrival of tourism as well as the search for freedom of expression and exhibition of semi-naked women in films after the fall of Franco’s regime.
These interconnected layers between my skin and the images let me take part in many different ways,like playing the role of pin-ups girls.

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