Documents 

Innovative prostheses are generating new possibilities for artists, performers and athletes with adaptive bodies. Performers, such as Aimee Mullins working with Alexander McQueen and Matthew Barney, and Viktoria Modesta working with Sophie de Oliveira Barata of The Alternative Limb Project, are leading the way in exploring an emerging terrain of unreal prosthetic limbs. This chapter compares this world of surreal prosthetic limbs to the drawing game ‘Exquisite Corpse’ invented in Paris in 1925 by the Surrealist artists André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy and Jacques Prévert, in the way they both raise powerful questions as to the boundaries of the human body and the interrelationship between the corporeal and the non-corporeal. In 2014 Erin Ball, the Canadian Contemporary Circus artist, after suffering severe frostbite, had both of her lower legs amputated. This chapter follows her in her determination to re-imagineer her adaptive body and to explore the world of surreal prosthetic limbs in Contemporary Circus performance. The writing also explores the emerging collaboration between Erin Ball and Kristina Walsh, a Canadian prosthetics designer, currently Artist in Residence at the Sarabande Studios which are run by the Alexander McQueen Foundation in London.