Woman Artist Turns Self Into Human Skin Rug

No, that’s not a deflated woman. It’s Chrissy Skin Rug, a work of art created by New York-based sculptor Chrissy Conant. What is it? A silicone rubber cast of herself. To make it, she shaved her body, coated herself in Vaseline, and lay spread-eagle on the floor, where she was covered with molding material. It’s like a bear skin rug — only she’s the animal. According to Conant, the piece was inspired by her relationship to her parents. “Parental influences from childhood continue to suppress me,” she notes, “long after I have grown up and they have gone.” After the jump, find out how she made it.

To exorcise a part of my psyche that feels powerless and objectified, I laid fully shaven, covered with Vaseline, and immobilized for hours, in a spread eagle position, while being covered with bucketfuls of gelatinous mold-making material. With the impressions, I made a life-sized, flesh-colored silicone rubber cast of myself as a human skin rug. The upturned head has long, perfectly coifed, wavy hair, that echoes the ripples in the flayed skin’s edge. The glossy-lipped mouth is open in a sexually suggestive way, and the glass eyes, complete with fantasy-length lashes, stare up submissively from the rustic wood floor section, upon which the rug is magnetically attached.