GETTING MYSELF A THICKER SKIN

GETTING MYSELF A THICKER SKIN is a series that explores both the subtle and the overt forms of injury, boundary transgression, and structural devaluation to which bodies—particularly those read as female—are exposed within social and institutional contexts. The work departs from the question of how personal experience, social expectation, and bodily integrity intersect, and how moments of wounding can be inscribed into materiality and form.

The series comprises three-dimensional miniatures of fragmented body parts: hollowed-out limbs, shattered and reassembled visages, abstracted fragments of a vulnerable self. These corporeal pieces appear like remnants of intense physical or psychological overwhelm—isolated, reduced, and yet already situated within a process of repair.

At the center of these works lies the hand-crocheted, skin-like layer that envelops the fragments: a “thicker skin” that marks protection, delineation, and healing at once. This textile structure is never merely a surface but an active intervention. It covers, binds, patches, preserves. The tension between the hard, damaged substrate and the soft, consoling texture of yarn produces a field of friction between hardness and care, vulnerability and resilience.

The series deliberately engages with ambivalent attributions of the “feminine” and the “masculine”—both in its material language and in its gestural propositions. The textile technique encounters raw, blunt forms; delicate handwork meets the brutality of fragmented corporeality. From this friction emerges an aesthetics of the in-between, where repair is not conceived as retrospective correction but as an autonomous, visible act of self-assertion.

GETTING MYSELF A THICKER SKIN negotiates wounding as transformation and asks how new layers of resilience can form without erasing the traces of lived experience. The works oscillate between intimacy and confrontation, opening a space in which fragility is not concealed but deliberately articulated.

• Anita Steinwidder, ongoing series since 2023
• Photos: Klaus Fritsch