Making human faces out of pig skin
How I met the German artist, Heide Hatry
In 2011, Joanna Ebenstein at the Observatory Gallery in Brooklyn generously invited me to give my first public lecture outside the UK. At the time, my PhD supervisor had me reading impenetrable French philosophers like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida, and I tried to translate this into something less abstract. So, I decided to talk about the history of skin grafting.
I actually made a pretentious little film at the time, which outlines what I was talking about. Here it is:
TLDR: your skin is a very different material depending on how close you are to it. If you’re far away, it changes very slowly and you can even identify people over decades. Right up close, though, it takes on an entirely other meaning and doesn’t necessarily even look human.
Anyway, I spoke about this kind of thing at the Observatory Gallery. I took into consideration a non-academic public, and called my talk ‘Knowing Your Ass From Your Elbow’, translating ‘arse’ to ‘ass’ for the benefit of my American audience. I thought this was pretty clever, but some po-faced academic collared me afterwards for being ‘inappropriate’ and ‘lewd’. I wish she could have met Heide Hatry, the German artist living in New York who got in touch with me before the talk.
Heide couldn’t make it to the Observatory Gallery, but wanted to know more about my work. I was flattered someone with their own Wikipedia page had taken an interest in me, so I promised her a dry run of the lecture if she could meet me a day or two earlier.
We met for an early lunch in a bistro on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. She was already sheltering from the sun under an umbrella, as a waiter pushed a two-egg herb omelette in front of her, all while balancing a carousel of condiments in the crook of his other arm. Her hair was up, but came loose when she tilted her head back to laugh, which she did often during her ice-breaker, which was to tell me about a friend of hers in her late 70s with the sexual appetite of a teenager. ‘She wants it soooo bad’, she said, ‘but has no one to do it with. If I were a man, I would just faaack her. It would make her sooooo happy’.
We bonded over eleven straight hours, two cafes, one restaurant, and the walk to her apartment on the Upper West Side. Over that time we’d covered my lecture material but also our entire lives. And in all this, she taught me the everyday importance of skin.
At the time, Heide sculpted human-like faces and heads out of pig skin for a living. She told me how a handyman came to do an odd job in her Manhattan flat. He opened her chest freezer, presumably mistaking it for a fridge, to get himself a beer — which must be acceptable behaviour for a contractor in America — and ran away when his hand brushed against one of her works in storage for an exhibition. He called the police who raided her apartment.
She started fashioning people out of pig skin on her pig farm in Germany, when her marriage broke down. She had the idea of making a likeness of her cheating husband from pig skin, then she’d set the neighbours Rottweilers onto it. So, she flayed a pig, sliced and sutured away at its skin, fashioned it into just the right shape, and popping some piggy eyes in for the final touch — she found exactly the right shade of blue, she told me.
The finished piece looked just like him, and seemed to come to life before her. She was a kind of reverse Pygmalion, reconstructing her husband’s identity out of surface materials, falling into hate with her creation. But before the dogs were ready to tear into it, the head started to rot and was soon too far gone.
You can have a look at some of the faces that stemmed from this project, and at her other work too, on her website: https://heidehatry.com.