Mandy El-Sayegh

Figured Ground: Meshworks

A split-level thickness graft involves the removal of the top two layers of the skin, the epidermis and the dermis. These layers are taken from the donor site where the healthy skin is located.

Figured Grounds: Meshworks is a continuation of a practice engaged in systems that interrogate the part-to-whole relation, specifically in relation to the breakdown of socio-political, economic and semiotic orders. Using latex, painting, collage and drawing as formal material devices to understand the conditions of growth, decay and emergence. Treating semiotic content as mutable material respectively. Emergence is a phenomenon that occurs when a larger whole comes into being through simple local interactions between smaller parts that do not exhibit the same properties. Via repetitive simple forms such as a hand painted grid, rectangular moulds or other repeating formats something other occurs that is not consciously intended or anticipated. Spatial contexts too affect the outcome of how these emergent properties manifest and act as parameters for a potentially ever expanding spread.

Using the found fragment as the genesis or kernel of growth, this fragment is that which disturbs the figure/ground relation, being that which is neither; a third element – both expelled and integral to the formation of a field/system.

Concepts of figure, ground, surface, and depth switch between and layer abstract schemas onto the literal field of the body, that which stands for the societal field, the Real, affects, the outside of measure, the Other. The violence of this superimposition of measure or abstraction onto this once ambiguous body to control the social field via exclusion and limit its potential for the emergence of new forms.

Meshworks, connective tissues, extra cellular matrices become a bodily metaphor to envision a social fabric that does not limit itself to dichotomies.

A means to re-insert, re-assert the excluded body, bodies without representation, states, existing on the border of signification and affect where generative capacities lie.