Sára Skoczková↓

About the work

Body shell

The work is based on the tendency to observe the mundane and perceive inner processes by exploring the shapes of nature and human body. People, the size and depth of each individual, resulting from their history, emotions, education, characteristics… We carry everything inside us. In our shells that have been given to us and deeply influence our lives.

The sculptures present material bodies, their structure, limbs and the space inside. Growth, fragility, security, and at the same time feelings of confinement and limitation. The likening of the human to an amphora relates to my previous work, where the amphora served as a safe place to put away necessities. A kind of intimate hiding place. The realization that the intimate hiding place is within me, and within each of us, led me to personify the amphorae. To create them as if their existence were truly present. To affect the space in their proximity. They are the bodies of beings, larger than life. Their weight is determined by the thin shell that defines their inner contents.

The chronological plot of the exhibition progresses through the four sculptures.

A pile of branches, preserved and sensitively treated. Their growth is arrested, they act as a living organism, just set aside.

A gate, a skeleton that defines space, both external and internal. Safety and at the same time a clenched feeling of the defined space in which we find ourselves.

The recumbent body of an amphora skeleton, reminiscent of a shell. A hiding place with a gate-like structure. A standing amphora, a being in dark shadow, the space inside hidden beneath the mass of the body. This might as well be an inner appearance.

“And don‘t you think it illiberal and greedy to plunder a corpse, and is it not the mark of a womanish and petty spirit to deem the body of the dead an enemy when the real foeman has flown away…“ (Republic, 469d)

I separate my self from my body. I see the body as a means of becoming real in this world. It is a shell, a defined space for my inner expansion. The body is the grave of the soul. The soul transcends its body and with physical destruction succumbs to life on earth.

The body itself is only a kind of appendage of the soul, shaped by the soul and through which the soul can manifest itself. If we understand man as a soul, then we are „imprisoned (to the body) like an oyster in its shell“ (Phaedrus, 250c).