Katrina Palmer: The Touch Report

 An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters.

Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’.

Want to see something real, says the artist as she creeps through the darkness, keeping a log.