‘I often say that my paintings are portraits of living within a body, rather than portraits of looking onto a body’

Upon reading Christina Quarles in conversation with David Getsy, I found that it gave me tremendous insight into the ways in which identity of the self are represented within Quarles’ work. Her paintings often come in and out of focus, allowing pieces of limbs and bodily representations to be fragmented to the point of being multiply situated. Accompanying these figures are patterned planed interjecting the bodily space and creating a setting that brings it in and out of focus with the planes being representations of both interior and exterior spaces simultaneously. In her paintings, generally the most determinable feature is hands and feet attached to a confusing tangle of vague and obscure representations of skin and breasts and stomachs and sometimes faces. The hands and feet are often more discernible as these are the parts of our own bodies that we are most familiar with, they are our outermost extensions compared the rest of the body which is more vague and murky to us, not to mention you’ve only ever seen your own face in a mirror never in person. When we see other people it’s easy to imagine they’re a whole person and have a complete sense of their own identity whereas when dealing with matters of the self it’s more vague and messy due to the ‘unknowability of our own face’.