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EXALTED “MEAT” (incomplete/ongoing project)

I used to despise Francis Bacon’s work, at a visceral level. But recent encounters with his paintings, especially his portraits, have changed me: his distortions have come to feel brutally true. Clearly, he is saying something that cannot be readily denied, escaped or avoided … his visual-artistic statements demand re-articulation and open-ended contemplation.

I made these portraits of Susannah to “think out loud” with images … to restate and test what Bacon once said about flesh and identity. He claimed that “we are meat, we are potential carcasses.” … and it appeared that he fundamentally accepted this state of affairs … it seems to me that he had resigned himself to the existential horrors that he so masterfully enacted in his paintings. I agree with him that we are, of course, in some ultimate sense, “meat” … but I reject this state of affairs! I resist his bottom line. I acknowledge that we are mortal, vulnerable—“meat”—yet I reject the materialist resignation that follows from it.

My aim is a conversation across time, not homage. By working with a dancer, I fold discipline and agency into the frame; motion blur and chiaroscuro echo Bacon’s language of damage while choreography, poise, and the insistence of light suggest an inner life that exceeds mere carcass.

These images repeat certain truths, but in order to further process them: anguish, fragmentation, the terrors of embodiment, etc.. But they also push back, looking for the seam where spirit presses through flesh. In short, I photograph to interrogate Bacon’s claim from within his own grammar: to affirm vulnerability while refusing reduction, staging a trial between despair and defiance, and asking whether, beneath the bruised surfaces, something enduring - something sublime - still speaks.

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