Bodyswap by Kim Seymour

Bodyswap is a story, an archive, a performance, an artwork. What you are looking at in the Isolation Room is something quite extraordinary – an allegorical but simultaneously real and authentic account of the meeting of two similar, very different women in the famous city of Oxford. One of the two women is the artist: young, pretty, vivacious, ambitious, compassionate. The other is a prostitute: young, pretty, damaged, and derailed by drugs – yet also retaining, against the odds, a degree of compassion. Bodyswap results from an unlikely and hardwon empathetic encounter between the two. Vividly aware of the Biblical resonances underpinning her practice, Kim Seymour entered into a difficult exchange: the prostitute used the artist’s lipstick to scrawl her feelings about plying her trade in the sordid underbelly of the City of Dreaming Spires, writing directly onto the artist’s skin. In an act of surrogate redemption, the artist then laboriously removes the lipstick, smudge by smudge. In a literal and a metaphorical sense, she takes on and then purges her skin of these traces, these stained thoughts and painful memories. It is the act of this exchange that constitutes the artwork and now you, the viewer, are embarking on another exchange, here in this room, giving some of your time and attention to contemplate what might otherwise go unnoticed, hidden in the shadows. In return, Kim Seymour, and her collaborator, give you their bravery, their insight and their compassion. Bodywap warrants and rewards your attention.—Paul Kilsby, Oxford 2012