My Nipples Aren't Pink
'My Nipples Aren’t Pink' is a small flip book series of my nipples stamped in pink orbiting the pages. As one of the first artworks built from my studio research for my PhD, this series was the initial testing ground for my investigations of colour and its relationship to the body and embodied trauma in this project. Originally this was a performance work, where I produced and bound these books live at the Mechanics Institute in Melbourne on a makeshift assembly line and distributed them amongst viewers. In the final rendition of this work I eliminated my bodily performing of the live production of each book, leaving the books to perform on their own. In doing this, I found the performative engagement between viewers’ hands, the pages of the book, and my body to explore the affective relationship between my body, colour, and other people’s touch. Where the labour of my body was the main focus of the live performing of this work, the abstract traces of my body activated by others’ touch readjusts the focus to the books themselves, presenting them as performative objects. I consider them performative in that the books—in the hands of an audience—perform the navigations of my body across each page.