Thumbs, Blue-White

“In her Muscle Movement Series II-IV (Range of Motion), Kaethe Kauffman strives to make the invisible visible through practices in meditation, writing, and art that evince spiritual cause and effect. The deceptively simple surface markings belie complex underlying muscle-tendon-joint-bone movements, recorded by pigment-dipped strings rotating across expanses of skin. In a similar was that grids are used in moire pattern projections to detect body distortions such as scoliosis, Kauffman uses pigment soaked yarn to demonstrate the results of her directed subsurface movement of muscles. The origins of her body marks partly began with an interest in the tattoo subculture in the Hawaiian Islands where she was additionally fascinated with other body modification measures, particularly those of wholeness and beauty that females sought in augmenting lip sizes and acquiring permanent eyeliners. In Hawaii she also studied yoga and meditation, with their disciplines of maintaining difficult, contorted poses with goals of building physical and mental integrity. On another level, yoga and meditation led to spiritual experiences and profound insights into the nature of existence. Additionally fascinated with the grace of movement through observations of Butoh dance theater, she queried, ‘What does this movement look like?’” - Koan Jeff Baysa, 2008

“In the three images selected, choreographed performative acts of flexing, extending, and rotating different junctions of the body, encircled by paint-impregnated yarn, graphically demonstrate the result of intricate subdermal muscle-joint-bone-neuromuscular orchestrations played out onto two-dimensional planes of bare skin” - Koan Jeff Baysa, 2008