In her solo exhibition ‘i don’t know how, but it grew from me’, Isabella Covert presents a pulsating laboratory of bodily excess. Drawing from feminist posthuman theory, the work in the exhibition challenges current notions of reproduction, gender, gestational labor, and family structures, suggesting the potentialities within alternative synthetic reimaginings of the body. Kinetically writhing cyborgian bodies exude and display their orifices, entangled in the wateriness of being.
Blurring the boundary between flesh and fabrication, the Frankensteining material process of the work displays the complex relationship between the artist as mother and her progeny. Contaminating and dismembering through research-based mediations, they evolve as shed skin. Writhing in the space between affirmation and contradiction, she excises and sutures these bodies. A surrogate for manufactured materials, laboring and producing their bodies, the artist’s role is that of both surgeon and mother. Indifferent and tender.
In the current era of evolving technological intersections with the body, the coupling of organism and machine is birthing reevaluations on the body’s potential. ‘i don’t know how, but it grew from me’, challenges traditional biopolitical structures, offering a reimagining through constantly exfoliating cyborgian skinscapes. Immersing the body in a laboratory of abundant notions of kinship, dualisms between gestator/machine, child/property, intercourse/procreation, and surrogate/mother are dissolved. Shifting perspective on gestational labor and the leaky excess of bodily production, this work questions the decisions surrounding synthetic biology, who has the authority to determine how human developments are distributed, and how advancements can restructure liberation.