The 'Exploring Boundaries' exhibition was initiated by John Haworth as a result of his PHD research into the creative process and took place at neo:artists gallery in Bolton in 2014. It brought together thirteen national and international artists working at the interface of traditional and digital art to produce innovative and exciting works. My series entitled 'Beneath the Skin' was developed for inclusion in the exhibition.
I began the project by inking my hands and making a number of mono-prints of my skin texture onto paper, which I scanned into the computer. The earliest known examples of art are prints of hands made on a cave wall thirty thousand years ago, so I thought it would be interesting to combine this most primitive of printmaking techniques with one of the most contemporary.
To achieve the illusion of looking deeply into the anatomy of my hands, I built up the images using semi-transparent layers. The background layers comprise photographs of cells that I took using a microscope and images of a model cell I constructed from resin.
