The Best Lady Anatomist - Deborah Prior

Opening - 6:00 PM - Wednesday, 7th of May

Artist Talk - 5:30 PM

Running - 7 May 2014 - 24 May 2014

Deborah Prior presents a new collection of work which fuses embroidery, well-worn cloth, and knitting into exquisitely gruesome and potentially organic forms. "The Best Lady Anatomist" has been developed using the leftover skins, scraps and wrappings from her PhD project: The Anatomical Venus. Exquisite Disgust & Desire: Crafting the Body in Contemporary Art Practice. As the Best Lady Anatomist, Prior remains fixated on the symbolic and experiential nature of cloth: of its relationship to skin, and of the dual attraction to pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of fabric.

Prior states, "the knitting of cloth affects an intrinsic, looped order onto yarn, yet in my hands this knitting creates lovely instances of disorder and un-form: visually satisfying and unsettling in equal measure."

Some might see this exhibition as collection of discards, of second-best outfits, of scraps swept from the machine-room floor. And they would be right. Prior has always had an affinity for the denigrated, the damaged, and the disordered: the unfathomable other, the abject, and the informe. "The Resurrection Men always left the grave-clothes behind when pillaging coffins - the cloth and possessions of the corpse were sacrosanct, their flesh less so - and it is these remains I gathered up to transform."