Feature: THE BIG PICTURE - Exhibition - Skin at the Wellcome Collection - until September 26th

Published: 17 June 

THE body’s largest organ, the skin, is the focus of this year’s summer exhibition at Wellcome Collection in Euston Road. As well as being a vital protective layer, the skin is crucial to our sense of touch and provides us with a highly sensitive interface between the body and the outside world. 

The appearance of a person’s skin – and marks like spots, scars, moles and wrinkles – can reveal much about an individual’s lifestyle, health, age and personality.

This multidisciplinary exhibition incorporates early medical drawings, 19th-century paintings, anatomical models and cultural artefacts juxtaposed with sculpture, photography, and film works by artists including Helen Chadwick and Wim Delvoye. It shows the cultural and religious importance of decorations on the skin – tattoos, make-up, body paint and piercing – and illustrates how skin can be preserved beyond its natural biological life.

The exhibition’s historical approach reveals how for anatomists of the 16th and 17th centuries the skin was simply something to be removed and discarded in order to study the internal organs. The story continues through the 18th and 19th centuries and approaches its conclusion in the 20th century, by which time the skin was considered to be of much greater significance and was studied as an organ in its own right. 

The exhibition is complimented by the “Skin Lab” which features artistic responses to developments in plastic surgery, scar treatments and synthetic skin technologies, including two newly commissioned   artistic works. Visitors are invited to participate in an interactive and sensory experience: experimenting with skin-flap models used in plastic surgery, trying on latex skin-suits or studying biological jewellery. 

• Skin is at Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 until September 26. Opening times: Tues-Wed, Fri-Sat: 10am-6pm / Thurs: 10am-10pm / Sun: 11am-6pm; Closed Mon (except Bank Holidays: 10am-6pm) www.wellcomecollection.org/skin. Admission free.

• Wellcome Collection are running a Tattoo competition. Entrants are asked to submit a tattoo design with the winning design being tattooed live within the exhibition in July. See online to view the entries and submit your own design: www.wellcomecollection.org/skin

• Pictured: ‘Mirror’ by Margi Geerlinks (courtesy of the TORCH gallery Amsterdam)