Freya Verlander reflects on an experiment leading seminar participants on a virtual ‘skin safari’. Part of the series ‘Contemporary Womxn’s Writing and the Medical Humanities’, guest edited for The Polyphony by Rebecca Rosenberg and Benjamin Dalton.
Liz Atkin is a visual artist, educator, and mental health advocate. Her work, which has recently been acquired by Wellcome Collection, explores the lived experience of compulsive skin-picking, a body-focused repetitive behaviour disorder. Fiona Johnstone, visual culture editor at The Polyphony, visited Atkin in her studio in south London.
How was skin observed, transformed, used, and interpreted in early modern Europe? Paolo Savoia reflects on a two-day workshop on ‘Artisans of the Surface in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1750’, King’s College London, 20-21 September 2018
‘Touch’ (second edition) by Tiffany Field (The MIT Press, 2014) ‘Like diet and exercise, we need a daily dose of touch’ (p. 143). Touch is simultaneously ‘the mother of the senses’, yet ‘the least
