The Skin I Have Been Living In
When the human body is cut, the skin begins a new story: a story of the past, pain, restoration, memory, and the scar. This story is a universal lesson of pure reality. Budka illuminates these stories by replacing the cold, lifeless lithographer's stone with swelling, breathing wood - wood that already has its own life story embedded within its grain. The wood absorbs Budka's drawings and incantations, forming an emotive picture of primal instincts, a cosmos of natural reactions - pain, frustration, animality, sexuality and love. But it is the skin that tells the body's story. In Budka's work the wood is the body and the paper becomes the skin that retains an...