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Talking of tits, back in 2013, the French artist Camille Lorin exhibited a sculpture made up of hundreds of breasts implants, just days after five managers of the PIP company went on trial for selling dangerous and sub-standard silicon implants. Perhaps more controversially, the artist Amalia Ulman – who has used her Instagram feed as a long-term project in which she "creates" a modern celebrity character – pretended to have a breast augmentation by posting photos of a bandaged chest. While the boob job proved to be a hoax, i-D reported that Ulman did spend £1,280 on having a non-surgical nose job and facial filler injections in Beverly Hills. Ah, the face. Perhaps above all other surgical interventions, it is the artist's relationship to their face that speaks so powerfully to our sense of identity. "Once you're in recovery, your face is so swollen you don't know what you're going to end up looking like, which was in itself a very strange experience," says Francis. "I mean, maybe it was partly induced by morphine. But also, because you're not able to physically feel your face for weeks, as all the nerves come back, you can't even regain a physical relationship with it. So my only anchor with my known physical aesthetic was looking into my eyes."At her exhibition, Francis' etchings, which show her unconscious face lolling behind an oxygen mask and the creepy smile of a flattened-out skull, are hung around the room at just the right height to force us, as viewer, to stare through those same empty hollows where Alana tried to unearth her sense of self."It's to do with this idea of the internal identity of your face," explains Francis. "You know you have a skull, but your personal relationship with your sense of identity isn't with your bones."Not bones, not flesh, not rolls of fat nor lines of skin; perhaps what the artistic fascination with surgery really shows is that distance between body and self. Perhaps, as the late Lady Jaye once put it, the body is a cheap suitcase; it's what we pack that counts. Artist of the Day runs until the 5th of July at the Flowers Gallery.@NellFrizzellREAD ON MOTHERBOARD: This Plastic Surgeon Just Periscoped a Boob Job
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