Skin as Feeling Vessel

This paper is the textual component for an ongoing visual arts MFA graduate thesis at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, BC). The document is structured to take up ideas around discomfort for the female body, through a phenomenological analysis of human skin as a feeling vessel. The media and installation work produced alongside this thesis is a cinematic visual inquiry to pose the question: where is feeling found? Socio-cultural, linguistic and psychological spaces are activated in a manner of thinking such that skin gets read as a border, drape, peel, screen, collector and container for feelings of discomfort, or dis-ease. As the chosen medium for this inquiry is the moving image, the thesis hones in on the ability of transference that film-as-body is capable of triggering. To locate subjectively internalized manifestations of dis-ease via the experience of embodiment is the broad ambition of the work.