Why skin?

‘Skin, skinning, skinned’ came about during my doctoral research on the intergenerational impact of the unspeakable traumas of a past war. I was searching for ways to articulate ‘responsibly’ what I understood as an aporetic wound: the inheritance of found letters detailing the deportation and death of my unknown Polish grandmother to a forced labour camp in Siberia in the 1940s.

This inheritance raised so many unanswered questions, not least the limitations of language and the written word as a mode of ‘working through’ trauma: if the act of writing did not save the original author, how could I then, as custodial progeny, and writer, use the written word to articulate all that this inheritance was asking of me?

It was for this reason that I chose to focus on the materiality of these artefacts; the so-often-overlooked surface upon which the written, in its inscribing and privileging, wounds.

Linking parchment with this project aligns with the letters as artefacts of correspondence and writing. For example, the use of parchment for writing and illustration is age-old. So, too, the letters in their materiality can be viewed as a kind of skin and thus a conduit of memory. Likewise, skin, in becoming parchment, appears as paper, but, when looked at closely, we see the pores, the scars, the ingrown hairs, even at times, the trauma of the impact that killed the animal.

Robert Reed, in his seminal work on ancient skin practices points out that although ‘skin is often regarded merely as the outer covering of an animal, stripped by crude and unwholesome methods in an abattoir… on the living animal, skin is an organ of immense complexity involved in a host of biological functions… it is a tough membrane, highly flexible and capable of adjusting to changes in body movement… it reflects many characteristics of the animal as a unique individual, for example, age, sex, diet, stress, and state of health’.[i]

Reed has reverted to the ‘living’ animal in his précis of skin’s wonders. I would argue, however, that skin, post-life, is also wondrous. And in this, it is worth briefly exploring some ideas relating to skin’s metaphysicality.

Skin as vulnerability

Epicurus claims that ‘learning consists of the atomic collision of bodies coming into contact with skins of other bodies.’[ii] This tactile explanation of colliding skin and bodies and the idea that ‘all bodies communicate with one another through a medium animated by spirit or pneuma’[iii] positions skin as essential to ‘bodily encounter and intercorporeal influence’.[iv] Rather than an impenetrable boundary to the invisible and mysterious inside, Epicurus’s musings discourage identification with a demarcated inside and outside. I think this is important, not least where skin is concerned and certainly not least in relation to concepts of trauma, for it invites the question what/who, then, is being exposed?

While Jean-Luc Nancy explains skin’s dichotomous terrain as ‘an authentic extension exposed, entirely turned outside while also enveloping the inside’,[v] Levinas privileges skin as the place of vulnerability, where ‘the aptitude … for “being beaten,” “for getting slapped,”’[vi] of being open to the other, for the other, to suffer by the other is to ‘take care of, bear, be in the place of, and consume oneself by the other.[vii]

Skinning the beast

I located my skin practice in Tasmania not only because of the huge amount of roadkill on the island’s roads but also because, after many years living on the island, the memory of these silenced, peripheral creatures still haunts. With a small population that has long hovered around 500,000, and commonly referred to as the ‘roadkill state’, the island is literally littered with burial sites. The statistics are staggering: 300,000 native animals killed on Tasmanian roads each year; an average of 32 animals killed every hour; and a roadkill density of 1 animal every 3 kms.[viii] These once living animals – which we identify as wallabies, wombats, Tasmanian devils, possums, echidnas, quolls – have in death been labeled simply as ‘roadkill’. We all know these creatures; they inhabit our peripheral memories. In life they are wild; in death they become victims of the road, that rupture of a placeless place that carries us (human animals) away from and to home.

I engage in a whole-of-practice process: that is, I go in search of the animals, skin the animals, engage in a kind of ritual burial of their carcasses, before then going through all the various steps required to make the parchment.

You could say that through this process it’s easy to forget any trace or essence of the animal’s being. And yet, this has not been my experience.

In animist traditions, the continuity of animal identity links non-human and human animals ‘in an intricate and circular set of relationships’.[ix] In these traditions, rituals involving hunting and the incorporation of animals into every aspect of daily life are a widely accepted practice. In the case of animal skins transformed into some artefact, whether a drum, a canoe, or a piece of clothing, for example, it is believed that the animal’s presence is still maintained. Engaging in the practice that I do, I concur with this belief.

Yes, it’s confronting. Yes, it’s brutal. Yes, it’s physically demanding. But in turn it’s also become a ritual of mourning. In finding the animal, and taking it to a location in the bush to skin it before burying it under fern fronds, tree branches and other forest detritus, there is an acknowledgement of their death and an honouring of the environment they inhabit. In skinning the animal, I ‘witness’ the impact of the vehicle that killed them, the injuries sustained.[x]

A dream encounter

The practice has become a kind of memory mapping: I remember where every animal was found, and where their carcass was buried (though the carcasses don’t remain for long; Tasmanian Devils and feral cats devour them quickly). I recall each tactile experience – whether they were young or old, male or female, the different thicknesses in their fur; the length of the eyelashes, the size of their ears, the different patterns on their paws, like whorls on our fingers; their beauty and wildness.

Throughout the whole process, I also talk with the animal. This was never a ‘conscious’ decision. Rather, it was more akin to a spontaneous utterance. This initially took me by surprise; I am, after all, working with dead, non-human animals. However, I’ve since come to understand these utterances as sensorial responses to the presence of the animal, which remains, despite the process of ‘erasure’, in the skin. But there’s also another encounter that further extends the liminality of this experience.

After I’ve skinned the animal it appears in my dreams. The first time this happened, I thought it was just my brain processing the whole brutal and traumatic experience. But no. This has happened every time. For two nights the animal appears in my dreams. It is not specific to the actual dream, which could be about anything. Rather, it just sits there, watching me quietly from the dream periphery. I don’t feel haunted by their appearances, at least not in any negative sense of the word. There is a recognition, a familiarity. It’s as if, in this dream-state encounter, an unveiling occurs, a dissolving between the real and imagined; as if the animal acknowledges the responsibility I now have for its skin.

I’ve never had a problem in believing this is exactly what’s happening. In many indigenous societies, dream encounters as a way of mediating between the self and other are not considered separate from the ‘everyday world’.[xi] But it is the intimacy inherent in the act of skinning, despite the act’s perceived brutality that engenders this mediation.

In his defense of skin workers, Robert Reed states: ‘Working with skin has always been regarded as a mean, unpleasant task, but for countless centuries most workers in the trade have instinctively appreciated the innate complexity and excellence of the raw material and have come to regard its products … as materials of unique character and beauty.’[xii] I’ve quoted Reed as I heartily agree with his statement.

The process of making parchment can be seen as akin to the erasing of identity, of memory; and the animal, as other, as an embodiment of silence – as victims of the road (an emblem of power), they are at ‘the receiving end of power [and thus] situated at the brink of silence’.[xiii] So much of what befell my grandmother and the millions of other women deported under Stalins’ brutal reign, speaks to that of the animal, that lesser, non-human Other, often captive and exploited, feared and ridiculed, and located outside those borders of a sovereign humanness. Jacques Derrida describes this as ‘the feminine beast and the masculine sovereign, la… le’ where, ‘in place of the beast one can put, in the same hierarchy, the slave, the woman, the child’.[xiv] Engaging in this practice, however, has facilitated a different kind of re-memorising, one that has been integral to the process of working through the traumatic and to the act of mourning. Thus in engaging with the dead, in this mourning of the beast, in this taking and reworking of their skin to articulate my own familial grief, in this inscribing of the silent creaturely, I have encountered a presence that belies those frames of reference located within a finitude of violence and loss.