Jonathan Armour: Birth Sleeves?

Taken from Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, sleeves are the term used for bodies that serve as a receptacle for the human consciousness. The body an individual is born with is called their Birth Sleeve. 

A recurring theme in trans-humanist thinking is that one day we will be able to upload our human consciousness into a device which can then be relocated into a new body (re-sleeved), whether naturally born, modified or artificially created.

This exhibition, Birth Sleeves?, is a celebration of the opened sleeves of 7 people from across the diversity spectrum, aged 50+, whose skins have witnessed and recorded their lives in a myriad of ways, some through their own choice, some resulting from bio-technological intervention but mostly from the abrasion of engaging with life as they progress through it.

Here each of us presents our sleeves for visitors to peruse and read, and perhaps consider if they would like to be re-sleeved into one of us.

Jonathan’s practice builds from a previous career in engineering and is an interplay between digital and oil-based works, including mappings of non-normative bodies, and digital investigations of the human body as a celebrated, objectified, abstracted form.

Often the work is driven by a desire to get under the skin, to pare away the superficial and reveal the substance, but it can be an urge to access the entire surface of the body in one go, to map the body like as terrain and to inspect its geography. This will be Jonathan’s first solo show.