Amanda Couch, artist and lecturer in Fine Art at UCA Farnham, alongside Mindy Lee, artist and sessional lecturer at UCA Farnham, and Andrew Hladky, artist, presented their project ‘On Innards’ at the 2nd Global Inter-disciplinary Conference of ‘Body Horror: Contagion: Mutation: Transformation’ in Athens, Greece, Friday 1st November 2013 – Sunday 3rd November 2013
Mindy Lee, Amanda Couch, and Andrew Hladky have come together as artists to explore intestines, entrails, and the digestive process as material, image, and metaphor for the creative process. The work moves between painting, objects, performance and film, and between representation and realism.
For part of the panel, Amanda performed ‘Reflection on Digestion: The Mouth’, in which she served glasses of Ouzo and tongue, alongside the presentation of a literary and visual text. Artistic, philosophical, historical, and physiological narratives were presented to explore how we cognitively and bodily digest knowledge and experience, and how we incorporate our sense of self. The participants were confronted by the monstrous tongue of an ox which, with its glistening taste buds, is vividly similar to our own, whilst literally and metaphorically ruminating on the processes of the ingestion, digestion, and subjectivity, and on embodied ways of knowing.
