Part of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series. Free to the public!
Japanese artist Mari Katayama features her own body in a provocative series of works combining photography, sculpture, and textiles. Born with a developmental condition, she has only two fingers on one hand and had both her legs amputated at the age of nine; she has worn prosthetics ever since. In order to fill a deep gap between her own understanding of self and physicality and contemporary society’s simplistic categorizations, Katayama began to explore her identity by objectifying her body in her art. Katayama treats her entire body, body parts, and prosthetics as “materials” to be arranged in photographs, read as soft sculptures, and decorated with lace, shells, and shiny objects. Katayama’s work exposes anxieties that haunt many of us — disabled or nondisabled — living in an age obsessed with body image.