INGRID EGGEN

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

Still thinking about Ingrid Eggen's pedknots. They look so uncomfortable that it actually hurts to watch. It seems as though toes have been amputated. This makes me think about how we continue to survive in our bodies. Eggen has consistently worked with the human form throughout her artistic career – previously using symbols and signs tied to communication, where she explored how physical expression can be distorted to create something new, based on the body’s unconscious ways of collecting and storing information.

As the exhibition text describes, the works are part of an ongoing exploration of how organisms and ecosystems have developed clever, innovative solutions to problems through evolution and adaptation, and how the human body might be transformed in response to future changes – a potential vocabulary for the body's affective intelligence.

I pick up the accompanying text, a short fictional piece by Ruby Paloma, where she paraphrases Samiya Bashir's quote: ‘How will we survive this having a body? Trying to be intelligent life,’ with: ‘Perhaps the body is the most intelligent part of us.’ And maybe this is why I’m so fascinated by Eggen's insistence on photographing the body. For how are we, as the accompanying text asks, supposed to survive being a body – in the face of the world's development? These works feel important, like the beginning of something larger in an attempt to evoke a new form of corporeality – shaped by the lived experiences of the body.