2015 Sony World Photography Awards - Category Winner, Enhanced, Open Competition
Antony Crossfield is an artist who lives and works in London. Through his art, Antony seeks to question and undermine traditional conceptions of corporeality while also exploring the relationship between the body and identity. Western thought has traditionally viewed the human subject in a dualist way, as consisting of two separate entities- mind and body. Epitomised by Descartes, this view insists that to be a self is above all to be distinguished from the other, to be ordered and discrete, a self secure within the well-defined boundaries of the body, capable of existing independently of the body rather than actually being the body. Antony Crossfield is interested in the synthesis of a variety of apparently contradictory dichotomies: mind and body, nature and culture, inside and outside, painting and photography, fiction and reality, and tries to collapse these distinctions into each other.
Through his photography, Antony seeks to challenge these conceptions of the self and the body. He is trying to present vision of the subject as fundamentally embodied whilst raising questions as to the closure and integrity of the self. Antony Crossfield wishes to present the body not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits, but as an organ of physical and psychical interchange between bodies- a kind of inter-subjectivity that produces identity. In his work the body is presented as unstable, ambiguous, fluid, and constantly in flux. Antony is hoping to highlight how our experience of the body is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies.