Daksha Patel: Bodytopos

Daksha Patel: Bodytopos

Bodytopos is an exhibition of beautiful and finely rendered drawings and prints by artist Daksha Patel.

The exhibition at Touchstones includes new work made in response to digital scans of the human body and to environmental datasets that predict changes in the physical landscape.

Daksha’s work explores different methods for mapping the human body and its interaction with the environment, often experimenting with the use of unstable materials to express a sense of change and movement. Clay, fat, graphite and natural pigments are drawn directly onto varied grounds such as vellum and latex to create drawings that are temporary.

Daksha Patel is a Manchester-based artist and a researcher at Northumbria University. Her work was featured in the Wellcome Trust exhibition ‘Brains: The Mind as Matter’ (2013) and she has undertaken residencies at The Christie Hospital, Manchester, and in the neuroscience laboratories at Kings College London.

With first-hand access to what our body looks like from the inside, Daksha’s work looks at the results of medical visualisation technologies and questions our fascination with seeing below the skin. “Being able to see inside the human body is still quite a powerful idea,” she says. “But does this make our bodies easier to understand or more complicated?”

As well as mapping the human body, Daksha explores country and city landscapes in her Slip Drawings, monitoring climate change through her maps of newly formed deserts in Portugal and flood depth levels in Newcastle.

Bodytopos will open on 13 December 2014 and run until 7 March 2015.