Activities
Site Specific
Wild People
Danielle Peters
28.12.12
ARTIST’S TESTIMONY
The idea of Wild People came to me for the first time when I saw the engravings of wild men by artists Martín Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer. I was interested in the way in which these mythical men were illustrated in the paintings and engravings in Medieval Europe, with their bodies completely dressed in skin as a symbol of their “otherness”.
My use of paper is often held up as a similar symbol of this “rusticity” or visceral raw experience. The skin, flagella, and modules I use to create the compositions for my drawings and paper sculptures represent physical and mental sensations experienced by humans, but that we may choose to ignore or to hide due to social pressures.
I am very attracted to things that cause immediate physical sensations and that therefore the outside world and our own consciousness can interfere with them. This is an aesthetic and a theme in my work which I plan to expand in this new performance series where I work with costumes cut by hand on paper, to resemble the appearance associated with certain types of subcultures in today’s modern world. I am very interested in other methods which people go through in order to self-discover and how they manage to organize themselves to reject the morality of culture and create their own code of ethics, one that best serves their own interests.
Through adapting and stylizing their musical taste, body language, appearance, dance, and slang that defines certain subcultures, my performance will awaken the myth of the Wild People.
