The body has never been singular. It is divided by memory, shaped by technology, marked by labour, gendered by language, racialised by history, politicised by borders, and dispersed across digital and physical realities. It is whole and broken at once.
The Fragmented Body exhibition is showing works that examine:
The body as archive — scars, memories, inherited histories
Dislocation, exile, and displacement
Medical, mechanical, or digital intervention
Prosthetics, avatars, extensions, and simulations
Surveillance and the commodified body
Psychological fragmentation and multiplicity
The body in pieces: symbolic, literal, metaphorical
We were delighted with the response and the inventive twists on the theme.
Artist: Hanzhi zhong
https://hanzart.com/
Description: "Internal Censor" is a series of monoprints created in 2023 by Hanzhi Zhong, reflecting her inner journey filled with complex emotions, portraying a chaotic state within. This collection emerges from a life-changing period that intimately acquainted Zhong with various feelings, including anxiety disorders. The images delve into the visceral experience of anxiety, drawing inspiration from somatisation, where emotional turmoil manifests physically.
Artist: Sean Bw Parker
https://www.saatchiart.com/en-gb/seanbwparker
@seanbwparker7
https://x.com/seanbwparker
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/seanparker100
Old Man on the Tube Reading Solzhenitsyn (2026)
Description: From a photo taken on the tube, as per the title. The man himself seemed intact enough, but the author of the book he was reading wasn't always so much.
Artist: Barbara Hulme
https://barbarahulmefineartist.com/
@barbara.hulme
Linked in - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-hulme-104b35264/
Self Portrait - Radiotherapy Room
Description: 25 x 25 cm - Watercolour painting of radiotherapy machine and me lying on the table with a hospital gown on and the radiotherapy machine above - a red light is shining on me, making me appear pink.
Artist: Ravi Modi
Snellen Chart
Description: This work revisits the Snellen chart, the 1862 medical tool designed to measure visual acuity and define the “normal” body through standardised vision. Rather than asking what we see, the chart measures how closely the eye conforms to an imposed norm. In this sculpture, the chart dissolves into a series of fractured cubic forms. Each cube represents a fragment of perception, the moment when the eye registers an image before it stabilises into certainty. Vision becomes discontinuous, unstable, and bodily rather than mechanical. Cast in bronze sourced from my archaeological hometown, the material carries the weight of historical memory. Like excavated artefacts, the fragmented forms suggest remnants of perception rather than a complete image. The work proposes that both memory and the body persist through fragments, through what remains rather than through wholeness.
Artist: Wanesa Kazmierowska
The land that birthed me, The land that raised me
This work began with the discovery of my own hair, which I had cut years earlier and forgotten beneath my bed. Hair is often understood as something that carries memory, holding traces of time, identity, and personal history. Using this physical fragment of my own body, I constructed a handmade doll that became a composite figure assembled from pieces of self, heritage, and lived experience. The doll’s face was sculpted from clay which I hand gathered from the land surrounding my hometown in Poland. That clay acts as both material and archive, carrying geological time, inherited history, and my connection to ancestry and place. In Slavic cultural traditions, hair is symbolically charged, associated with strength, identity, and rites of passage. My own haircut took place outside expected family tradition, becoming a personal rupture. Incorporating my hair into the figure transformed it into both a relic and witness of my existence and growth. I also used a second clay, sourced by me from the coastline in Swansea, to construct the doll’s shoes. Unlike the Polish clay, this material was waterlogged, slippery, full of shells and sea-worn matter, and deeply tied to the place where I grew up. If the face represents inheritance and origin, the shoes represent lived and walked experience: the body shaped not only by where it comes from, but by where it has moved, stood, and remained. The contrast between the two clays reflects the split between different geographies that have formed me, one tied to family history and origin from poland and one to everyday lived life in Wales. The doll’s body is stitched together from recycled fabrics and filled with found materials from around the home, preserving a visible handmade quality through seams, joints, punctures, and attachments. Rather than presenting the body as seamless or complete, the work emphasises assembly, fragility, and construction. The figure becomes an unstable self-portrait made from separate but connected parts: hair, clay, fabric, memory, land. In this way, the work explores the body as archive, surrogate, and fragmented site. It is both intimate and uncanny, suspended between childhood object and effigy.
Artist: Nguyen Minh Tri (Tonee)
“Cocoon”
Description: This work explores the body as a site of construction, defence, and psychological fragmentation. It materialises the "outer layer" i.e. the self-projections, insecurities, and masks we adopt to navigate the world. By transforming aluminium wire, traditionally a tool of constraint and labour in bonsai sculpture, into a tactile form, Tonee reimagines the "bond" as the body itself. The project aligns with the theme by treating the sculpture as both a prosthetic extension and a metaphorical archive of internal struggle. It interrogates the body by literalizing the boundaries we build: are these walls concrete, or permeable cocoons? The work addresses multiplicity by inviting viewers to interact with, bend, and wear the piece, effectively turning the audience into a living extension of the work. The submission consists of two parts: a physical sculpture and a video component. By encouraging viewers to engage with the sculpture, the work challenges the traditional borders of the gallery. It suggests that the body is never singular. It is a collaborative performance between the physical self and the external structures we choose to inhabit. Viewers are left to wonder: in this shell, are we protected, or are we simply butterflies waiting to break free from a self-imposed cage?
Domenico Barra
http://www.dombarra.art/disverse
@domenicodombarra | https://www.instagram.com/domenicodombarra/
@dom_barra | https://www.instagram.com/dom_barra
D.B. 🥀 | [∆PP∆RƏNT] B0DY ∆RT 28 is a one-minute video work from the ongoing series [∆PP∆RƏNT] B0DY ∆RT — a project born from the emotional impact of existing in two realms simultaneously: the physical body and its digital double. In the laboratories of our digital era, human metamorphosis unfolds. Synthetic flesh. Inert codes. Apparent bodies. Ultra-sophisticated algorithms shape reality while social media becomes a testing ground for fabricated existences staged alongside the true essence of the skin we inhabit. The body we wear is the image we desire — yet we remain irreversibly dependent on formulas. We are both perpetrators and victims of our own flesh: corporal colonisation, cerebral annihilation. The video constructs a collision between disorder and poetic revolt — a manifesto of rebellion against the loss of control over our own bodies. AI-generated imagery and databending glitch techniques explode images of bodies that seem simultaneously alive, silent, screaming, moaning: flesh, blood, scars, and sweat rendered as digital ritual. A voiceover runs beneath the visual fragmentation, speaking a language deeper than words — whispers, declarations, fragments of resistance. Every wound, cut, and shred of flesh is a transition from representation to reality. Shreds of bodies become traces of silenced stories, humiliated existences, abused and consumed forms. The viewer is both victim and executioner. [∆PP∆RƏNT] B0DY ∆RT is a political act: a transgression of social taboos, a condemnation of the commodification of bodies and souls, a reclaiming of the apparent body as a site of resistance — asserting the real body in all its varied, irreducible imperfections.
Artist: Daisy Ledgard
Description: The film Hum Tic (2024) centres on a mouth’s silent articulations accompanied by a soundscape derived from a vocal tic, a nervous throat clearing, fragmented and reworked through repetition. In doing so, the work treats the body as both archive and instrument: a surface where memory, expectation, and social pressure are inscribed and re-performed. The fragmentation of the vocalisation mirrors psychological fragmentation, and the repetitive, disjointed gestures foreground bodily experience as a form of resistance to prescriptive social norms. Through repetition, accumulation, and sensory tension, the film creates a space where discomfort, hesitation, and rupture can be felt and contemplated. The body is at once whole and broken, visible and internalised, expressive and constrained. By attending to involuntary sounds and gestures, Hum Tic explores how fragmentation can be generative rather than pathological, offering a lens to understand how contemporary life is embodied, and how identity, agency, and affect emerge across ruptured, layered, and mediated experiences of the body. In this way, the work aligns with the zine’s theme of the fragmented body, presenting the body as archive, surface, and site of transformation, where rupture and multiplicity reveal the subtle politics, intimacies, and tensions of lived experience.
Artist: Tina Anderson
andersontina.com
Description: ”The Twins” reflects on the body as a fragmented entity: doubled, psychologically divided, and no longer whole. The work presents two connected figures as if they emerge from a single broken structure, suggesting a body split into mirrored presences. Their relationship is both intimate and unsettling, evoking dependence, separation, and the instability of identity. The piece responds to the theme of the fragmented body through duality and multiplicity. Here, fragmentation is not only physical but also symbolic and emotional — the body becomes a space where memory, inner conflict, and transformation take visible form. The twins are not simply two beings, but an image of one existence divided against itself. This work approaches the body as a poetic and metaphysical site: incomplete, echoed, and altered. It invites reflection on how the self can fracture and still remain connected to its own other half.
Artist: Rachel Riggs
https://yardworks.wordpress.com/
RRiggs Damaged Heart 30x21cm mixed media 2021
Description: This was a tragic event in the Uk in 2008, when a poor working class young girl went missing, I was always really struck how the mother of the lost daughter - Karen Mathews - couldn’t hold the Madonna pose with her kids teddy bear, at the press conference when her daughter Shannon was missing, couldn’t show empathy and her being unable to answer questions as she was so broken and so unattached from herself, from years of abuse and poverty. Her un-empathetic eyes, I was so moved by the incredible sadness of the story of what really happened, of being so depraved and pulled apart to do such a thing as pretend your daughter had been kidnapped. I kept the torn newspaper cutting I found where someone had poked out the eyes with a burning cigarette to use in a collage, a broken, fragmented Madonna.
Artist: Chelsea Johnson
https://www.chelseajohnsonstudio.com/
Description: Ancestral Totems (2025) is a sculptural body of work that explores the fragmented body as a site of inheritance, memory, and embodied transmission. Each work is constructed from repeated casts of nipple forms set individually into resin blocks and arranged into upright totemic structures. Isolated from the body and multiplied, these forms become fragments: intimate remnants that speak to nourishment, vulnerability, repetition, and loss. The work emerges from an ongoing enquiry into maternal lineage, intergenerational trauma, and the ways bodies hold what cannot always be spoken. By separating the breast into repeated units, I treat the body not as singular or whole, but as dispersed across memory, relation, and history. Encasing each fragment in resin suggests both preservation and suspension, as though these bodily traces are being archived, held in time, or passed down as psychic residue. Installed as ancestral markers, the totems suggest memorials, reliquaries, or ritual objects. Their vertical arrangement transforms soft bodily references into structures of endurance, carrying the tension between care and rupture, intimacy and distance. The repeated fragments accumulate into a collective form, evoking how trauma, memory, and inherited experience are transmitted across generations. In relation to The Fragmented Body, Ancestral Totems considers the body as both broken and communal: divided into parts yet never separate from history or from others. Fragmentation is approached here not only as rupture but as a condition through which the body becomes an archive of survival, grief, and transformation.
Artist: Gary Willis
"There, not here"
Description: The fragmented body. There, not here. A remembrance. In memory of my mum and dad. With the last ever photographs I took of them. Installation - photographs, chairs, dust sheets, empty room.
Artist: Julia Eichbauer
https://juliaeichbauer.com/
Description: ”Fragmented Strength”: A Dialogue Between Clay and Iron. This piece explores the resilience and fragility of the human form through the interplay of clay, fire, and metal. The fragmented female torso, shaped in clay and fired to terracotta, embodies both vulnerability and endurance. Sewn together with iron wire, the pieces speak of repair, tension, and connection—echoing the scars and mended fractures that shape identity and experience. Iron plays a dual role: it binds the sculpture while also being the very element that gives terracotta its distinctive red hue. This intrinsic connection between materials—iron within the clay, iron holding it together—mirrors the unseen forces that shape and sustain us. Through this fusion of strength and fragility, the piece invites reflection on transformation, resilience, and the beauty and poetry found in imperfection.
Artist: Ivana Ranisavljević
Description: Performance for camera (part II): Shared Skin Author: Ivana Ranisavljević Camera: Filip Stefanović, Đorđe Cvijović Photo: Filip Stefanović Link: https://youtu.be/NoDrPp4KaQI Shared Skin (2024) is a triptych of performances consisting of "My Body My Playground" and "Your Mind is Your Battleground" (performed for camera), and "Redefine" (live performance). Across these works, the artist inscribes text into her own skin using needle and thread or a scalpel, positioning the body as both surface and site of intervention. The body is approached as an archive — a palimpsest where cultural, political, and personal inscriptions accumulate, overlap, and are contested. Through the act of stitching and cutting language into the skin, the work exposes how identities are not fixed but continuously written onto the body, often through systems of control. Borrowing and recontextualizing the visual language of Barbara Kruger’s Your Body is a Battleground, Shared Skin shifts the focus inward. While Kruger addresses the body as a public and ideological terrain, this work internalizes the conflict, staging the body as both subject and object of inscription. The phrase My Body My Playground oscillates between empowerment and critique, echoing neoliberal narratives that frame the body as a site of self-management, consumption, and display. Color operates symbolically: red evokes vitality, sexuality, and creative force; white suggests introspection and renewal; black marks neutrality and balance. The words ground and re are not stitched but carved, emphasizing the violence embedded in processes of redefinition and the necessity of rupture in reclaiming agency. By fragmenting the work into three textual and performative gestures, Shared Skin reflects the multiplicity of the self under conditions of surveillance and commodification. The body becomes a contested territory — simultaneously disciplined and reclaimed — where transgression functions as a method of resistance and self-articulation.
Artist: Huiyi Xiao
Description: In “Cumin Fur”, I adhere cumin seeds onto the bare skin around my genitals following my first pubic hair removal in Australia. As a Chinese immigrant, I was raised to see body hair as a legacy from parents—removing it risked breaching filial piety. Sexuality, too, was taboo. Yet in Australia, I encountered new norms: smooth skin for intimacy. With excitement, anxiety, and shame, I removed my pubic hair. And then I re-covered the bare skin with cumin seeds—a Chinese culinary herb. Their spike-like shapes, tough texture, and pungent scent substitute for the hair I removed, evoking the psychological friction between conflicting cultural inheritances.
Artist: Elisa Galelli
Sindoni. An interrupted frequency.2
Description: The project I´m sending to you it is a series of Cyanotype prints of photos of different people, different bodies or parts of it, which I do assembly as to purpose another view of it. Proportions stays the same but something looks different, embracing our ability as humans to interpretate what we see and reconnect it to something we know, even it doesn’t´t look exactly like the real one, creating a moment of misunderstanding between what we see and what we perceive. This aesthetic moment of visual “interrupted frequency” helps to create a sublimation of the humanity of these bodies, an expression of holiness, a spiritual value to them. The name I gave to this Project is “Sindoni”, from the sacred Shroud of Turin (in Italian “Sindone”) for its being a trace of a body, a faraway reproduction of a person. This burial shroud is a fascinating example of what is hidden between believe, art and authenticity. Due to the christian tradition, it is considered as the burial shroud in which the body of Christ was wrapped in after the crucifixion. For many devotees this shroud has a big religious value, being a relics of the Passion of Jesus. If the image on this burial shroud is the impression of the body of Jesus or not, it doesn’t matter: what actually make it so important is what is called a “transfiguration”. It means the spiritual meaning of it is given from a popular belief and its value comes from popular acceptance of it as a “memento”, not from a scientific proof. What I´m trying to express with my cyanotypes is the same achievement of holiness and acceptance for everyone’s body: any body should be holy to itself. Taking pictures of a person, of their body and working on it through an aesthetic process transforms it into an art piece, which can be perceived by others with a new meaning. This is for sure a subject of the different perceptions of everyone but it still preserves a character of timeless holiness and plus-significance. It means we decide what we want to believe and what is our perception about it, which are the criteria for the value we are giving to something. The Shroud of Turin is a universal Symbol, which is seen as a religious object for hundreds of years by different folks. In my project I´m mirroring this universal meaning, representing bodies and their value as testifiers of human experience. The techniques of Cyanotype printing suits this paragon with the shroud being also a kind of silhouette of the negatives which slowly emerge on paper, just like the image of the body took its time to appear on the fabric. The picture which arise from the sensible paper is a kind of imprecise image that gives it a flair of timelessness and longing. The lack of definition in the cyanotypes prints is empowering its feature as mystic picture, creating a little world between what can be seen (reality) and our perception of it guiding our gaze and perception to see something we are not maybe ready for. The specific blue tone of this technic underlines the feeling of a surreal atmosphere lost in the past but still very present. It may look as someone was taking picture of bodies in a faraway time, brought them in our time space giving them a new spiritual meaning, a new perception. Something connecting past and present, founding itself in a niche of timeless emotion.
Artist: The Naked Artist - Suzie Pindar
www.thenakedartist.co.uk
@suziepindar
Late period 7 months
Description: The absence of blood during my period has affected my mind far more than my body, at least in my personal experience. In 2024, I created a series of videos that eventually led me to sit in front of a mirror and let my subconscious guide me—this was the result. After making this video, I felt genuinely unsettled for the first time. I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror; both my mind and body felt like they belonged to someone else entirely.
Artist: Zixin Yan
zixinyan.org
Rethinking Birth
Description: This work sits at the intersection of two research threads: an archival interrogation of how reproduction has been visually constructed across cultures, and a material practice testing what a female voice might propose in response. Acrylic on calico, oil on acrylic gel, latex and ink: each surface behaves differently, resisting the unified image that medical representation of the female body has historically imposed. The work imagines what the thesis frames as the condition of artificial womb technology: the organ separating from the body, the maternal becoming disembodied, flesh reduced to a composite of surfaces, traces, and contested memory.
Artist: Roseline (Jingyuan) Zhang
@roseline_zhang and @roseline_z_art
Description: When We Listen to Our Body through Emotions [II] is an interdisciplinary painting and performance that investigates how emotions, often hidden and unresolved, live invisibly within our bodies and shape our behaviours. They are also the source of intimacy. However, when left unexpressed, they can accumulate in the subconscious, influencing us in ways we do not see and even causing illness over time. This project seeks to translate those invisible senses into visual and physical forms through an interdisciplinary practice between drawing and movement.
Artist: Jie Huang
www.jsusya.com
Description: Showing Off explores the fragmented body through the erasure of identity under family and social pressure. Inspired by a phenomenon in China where parents use their children’s achievements as proof of their own value and success, the work examines how children can be shaped into extensions of parental ambition rather than recognised as independent selves. The installation focuses not on trophies or certificates as symbols of accomplishment, but on the invisible labour, discipline, and emotional burden behind them. The children’s faces are intentionally obscured, reducing individual identity and directing attention to the body as something hollowed out by expectation. Piles of test papers act as traces of repetition, control, and performance-based value systems. Rather than presenting fragmentation in a literal sense, the work treats it as psychological and social: a body divided.
Artist: Guo Cheng
https://guocheng.cargo.site
Knee Fold
Description: Derived from the hollow behind the knee, this form captures a moment of compression—where movement produces absence rather than presence. The imprint records a temporary state of the body, yet persists as a solid fragment. By embedding repeated facial images onto its surface, the work dislocates identity from physical coherence. The body is fragmented not through rupture, but through the accumulation of partial states.
Artist: Johannes Christopher Gerard
www.johannesgerard.com
Fragmented Cocoon
Description: Photographic work Category: Psychological fragmentation and multiplicity A Changed Perception of the World and the Fragmentation of My Mind and Body Through personal struggles with chronic mental health conditions (including neurodivergence) and hearing problems (auditory processing disorder (APD)), I began to build, or rather create, a kind of cocoon. To protect and shield my body and mind, which had been fragmented by my impairments. But also to protect myself and my social environment. I often feel as if my mind and body are falling apart. I can't see, hear, speak, walk, or move. That should actually be the cocoon's second function: to hold my mind and body together. But lately, even the cocoon has often been disintegrating.
Artist: Lorna Moore
Parts of Me are Missing 2025
Description: Parts of Me are Missing engages the body as a primary site of memory, perception, and trauma. Lorna Moore’s practice draws on the understanding that experiences associated with conditions such as PTSD and ADHD are not confined to cognition but are carried somatically, often manifesting through involuntary responses including fight, flight, and paralysis. Through performance for the camera and the use of stop-motion animation, Moore constructs a visual language in which stillness and movement coexist. Frozen images become sites of tension, suggesting states of suspension or interruption, while projected motion introduces the possibility of transition and reconfiguration. Central to the work is the concept that the body is fragmented through somatic memory. Tacit remembrance shapes physiological responses to triggers, shaped by earlier experience. Therefore, often influences present behaviour and forms of self-sabotage, particularly within relational contexts. The interaction between Moore as the performer and her disassociated image generates a dynamic field in which identity is not stable but continuously negotiated. Moore’s process resists purely linguistic or analytical description. Decisions within the work emerge through embodied judgment rather than codified method. Meaning often becomes legible only in retrospect, as images accumulate and begin to evoke memory. It’s through this method that Moore finds a way to reconnect with the parts missing from her perception of ‘self’. This approach aligns with phenomenological accounts of perception, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as the primary medium through which the world is encountered. Within this framework, the body is not an object among others but the condition through which experience is structured. In Parts of Me are Missing, image, movement, and sound produce a continuous negotiation between presence and absence. The work does not represent memory as a fixed record but as an active process enacted through the body in time. The constant repetition of sound and image outlines the perpetual cycle of habitual behaviours and responses.
Artist: Lukas Nosek
https://arthinkso.com/collections/artist-lukas-nosek?_pos=1&_psq=luk&_ss=e&_v=1.0&utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnAbyqGrYQh9PHjvv6x9wSmzdyfwIIuZfFmsNv1SiCV1BKm_QGIoiJhss4uVs_aem_nYiLNitaPzu4ZTYOG_X98g
Detail of the self, scan 1, head
Description: A reaction to the general mood of eclectic freedom in our post-postmodern world. Humans are fragmented by the constant stream of information and the visual smog of the public space. As someone with ADHD, I am particularly sensitive to this.
Artist: H Boone
Breach
Description: (2025) 3D Printed PLA, Auto Body Filler, Lacquer 20 x 29 x 26 in Body horror allows me to play with the point at which a body becomes unidentifiable and unruly. I am inspired by monsters, aliens, and other beings beyond the human in stories like The Thing, Jeff Vandermere’s Borne, and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Series. These references to body horror have their roots in science fiction, offering me opportunities to imagine and materialise speculative futures centred around embracing the unknown. By hybridising the recognisable and bodily with abstracted forms in the language of body horror, I visually play with ideas of transgender legibility and non-binary ambiguity.
Artist: Mohsen Saeb
https://www.andwherever.space
Description: Self-Portrait is a photographic series made along highways between Iranian cities, where I use distance and landscape to rethink what a self-portrait can be. Instead of staying close to the camera, I place my body far into the frame, letting it appear small, isolated, and partly absorbed by its surroundings. Through this repeated act of walking into the landscape and returning to the image, the work becomes less about showing the face and more about exploring presence, distance, and belonging. The project connects to The Fragmented Body through its focus on displacement, psychological fragmentation, and the unstable feeling of the self. In these images, the body is not presented as fixed or complete, but as something shaped by distance, uncertainty, and its relation to the environment. The roadside landscapes are not just backgrounds; they become part of the emotional structure of the work, reflecting feelings of disconnection, exile, and inward searching. Fragmentation appears here quietly and metaphorically, through scale, isolation, and the tension between presence and disappearance. The series asks whether the self is something we can clearly hold, or something that is always being shaped by memory, movement, and the spaces we pass through.
Artist: Leah Jordan
www.leahjordan.art
Hemochrome Blood Cell Trio
Description: Glazed stoneware ceramic. The Hemochrome Collection concerns blood cells; the tiny beings that flow around the body, transporting fuel to our organs and fighting off invaders autonomously. The internal body is a machine with unfathomable working parts, keeping us functioning without conscious input. My making process involves taking a copy of a copy, bouncing between drawing and sculpture. In the repetition of this method, something gets lost each time, resulting in uncomplicated forms. This minimalism references transhumanism; the path of designed evolution where technology and the body merge. These works celebrate the unconscious flow of the body, and explore an imagined path of human evolution where technology is intrinsic. When will the concept of what we define as human cease to exist?
Artist: Fia
Disoriented Together
Description: This is a series of figures that merge into one another, showing the limits of abstracting figures from sculptures with visually missing or repeating body parts, distorting how you view a normal figure. Looking at perfectly formed, complete statues, then looking deeper into the truth, that nothing is perfect, by merging lots, we make one thing. Questioning what it really is and why?