Deborah Duffield Artist

Firstly, what is an Écorché? Complete aside… when I voice to text, writing this blog, my voice saying ‘Écorché’ came up as, ‘echocardiogram Shea’ I had never heard of either term before last week, I still don’t know what an ‘echocardiogram shea’ is, but I now know that an Écorché is a figure, drawn, painted or sculpted, that shows muscles of the body without the skin. 

After a number of days spent, yet again, with ‘Visible Body’ and Goldsmiths, ‘Human Anatomy for Artists’, reading up on attachments and actions of the muscles in the arm, leg and torso, we headed down to the sculpting room and spent the next three days building an Écorché.  

Starting with a wire frame roughly proportional to a human figure, we used terracotta clay to sculpt the bones and muscles onto the frame. We worked in a specific order, attaching deepest muscles first, building up to the superficial, layer upon layer. It was so exciting to form the armpit, attaching Latissimus Dorsi at the rear and Pectoralis Major at the front, filling crevices with slithers of clay muscles until the human form emerged.

It’s about the making and links to a post I wrote in January where I talked about haptic drawing (drawing from touch). Experiencing volume and shape, increasing my familiarity, leaving my brain free to think about my creative process . The more senses I can employ to gather information the greater my understanding will be. Let’s face it I need all the strategies I can to help combat deterioration of memory!

The final result was a pretty rough one-sided Écorché, people spend months creating a perfect Écorché.  This was all about the process and not the end result. Three solid days to build and about 15 seconds to dismantle!