While science and what lies beneath has always intrigued me, it’s true that my mind always worked better in the company of well structured paragraphs or artful composition than musculature. Yet, in Skin, the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, poised ecorche figures draping their skin from their limbs, as artfully as Botticelli’s ladies’ togas, beckon us into a world where the scientific embraces the artistic.

Dating as far back as 200BC, most of the work on show comes before the days of high-resolution cameras and pinhole surgery that let us look inside ourselves in the most literal sense - as opposed to metaphysical. However, having said that, I couldn’t help but notice the Nietzsche quotation from bane-of-my-university life, Thus Spake Zarathustra: ‘the devil himself is perhaps skin’. So with science, art and religion all accounted for, Skin immediately promises to deliver an intriguing discussion of the role of the largest and most sensitive organ in the human body…no, sadly not that one.

From anatomical Roman votive objects to a depiction of the Circumcision of Christ and a statuette of poor Job with a nasty case of syphilis, Skin gradually breaks down the notion of science and art as polar opposites, presenting skin as a marker for our place in society, whether it be as a sinner, a victim or simply someone with an unfortunate skin complaint. But in this rare union of art and science, even this can become aesthetically pleasing as Tamsin van Essen’s ceramic depictions of blemished skin prove.

And then there is impetigo. Something of a taboo subject but here, the vision of quarantined school children and unfortunate flaking is given a fresh, almost cherubic, face in the form of 18^th century medical drawings. A part of me couldn’t help but wish I had been so lucky to own such a textbook as opposed to the inescapably high resolution horror show that was my GCSE biology book. Now I am by no means saying impetigo is beautiful, it is not, but under the Wellcome Collection’s expert curatorial eye somehow even the most revered skin complaint has been transformed into a work of art.

Back in present day, Margi Geerlink’s Mirror exemplifies our continued obsession with skin and its social implications, exploring the desire to evade the inevitable aging process, as an elderly woman attempts to cover her wrinkles in make-up. Her desire for eternal youth is echoed in the next photograph where two 1920s ladies partake in their beauty regime, fashioning get-up not unlike something from Man in the Iron Mask. Only rubber. A medicated rubber mask. Lovely as it would be to remain wrinkle free for eternity, I would personally prefer not to don what is essentially a gimp mask on a nightly basis to do so.

These photographs demonstrate just how deep society and culture infiltrates our very skin, though not quite as literally as when we choose to use our skin as a canvas. From the codification of life stories in crudely inked drawings on the bodies of South African Number Gangs to Maori tattoos where skin gives new life and permanence to traditions of the past, to preserved 19^th century tattoos of naked women that once marked a trade on the bodies of prostitutes or served as a memory of those left behind on the arms of soldiers or prisoners, Skin celebrates the social significance of the making skin art.

It is something we can never take off and this exhibition teaches us to embrace our skin and utilise it in any way possible…though ideally not like Oliver Goulet, namely creating a collection of skin apparel that would put Silence of the Lambs to shame…thankfully it’s synthetic. And you can try them on. But I guess they do say clothes are our second skin…

Skin is open until 26 September at:

Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
Euston
NW1 2BE

Image: ‘Mr Green’ Araminta de Clermont and Michael Hoppen Contemporary