We were kissing all night
staining my neck
purple and amazing
Daniel Mudie Cunningham was gifted a hickey-stained neck for his 20th birthday, inspiring a series of performance photographs. Blowing onto windows, steaming up the glass, Hickey pondered the erotics of bodily inscription. "My skin is like glass; it is fragile, capable of being stained, steamed and broken. Steam up the glass and it fades like a hickey; just as the hickey fades like steamed glass," he wrote in a diary entry in 1995.
In its first iteration for the exhibition Strange Bedfellows at Space YZ, UWS Nepean, the images were face-mounted to textured glass, emulating the look of semi-transparent bathroom tiles. When the exhibition traveled to H-Block Gallery at QUT, the series was reduced to a single image that was enlarged to fit the size of a discarded window frame. In 2023, the series was presented as a photo essay for Are You There? at Wollongong Art Gallery curated by James Gatt.
Hickey 1995, printed 2023
Pigment prints on Hahnemuhle photo rag
Camera: Kirk Hansen
39 x 64 cm (framed)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
staining my neck
purple and amazing
Daniel Mudie Cunningham was gifted a hickey-stained neck for his 20th birthday, inspiring a series of performance photographs. Blowing onto windows, steaming up the glass, Hickey pondered the erotics of bodily inscription. "My skin is like glass; it is fragile, capable of being stained, steamed and broken. Steam up the glass and it fades like a hickey; just as the hickey fades like steamed glass," he wrote in a diary entry in 1995.
In its first iteration for the exhibition Strange Bedfellows at Space YZ, UWS Nepean, the images were face-mounted to textured glass, emulating the look of semi-transparent bathroom tiles. When the exhibition traveled to H-Block Gallery at QUT, the series was reduced to a single image that was enlarged to fit the size of a discarded window frame. In 2023, the series was presented as a photo essay for Are You There? at Wollongong Art Gallery curated by James Gatt.
Hickey 1995, printed 2023
Pigment prints on Hahnemuhle photo rag
Camera: Kirk Hansen
39 x 64 cm (framed)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
