Body Print of Mary

Sonia Landy Sheridan’s Body Print of Mary, a large-scale nude portrait composed of photocopied color prints transferred to fabric, is a striking example of the artist’s pioneering work with emerging image-making technology. 

Sheridan’s experiments with serial image-making began in the late 1960s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a professor. Part of the impetus came from Sheridan’s involvement in anti-war protests. Frustrated with the slow process of silk-screen printing, she and her students sought new ways to distribute posters and other materials. For a brief period, they used the school administrative office’s Xerox machine, before access was restricted due to overuse. 

Sheridan subsequently obtained a Thermo-Fax photocopier manufactured by the 3M Company. It was her contact with 3M (the machine needed repairs) that led to an invitation for an artist residency at the company’s color research lab in the summer of 1970. 

During her residency, Sheridan was introduced to 3M’s latest invention. Released the previous year, the Color-in-Color (C-in-C) was the world’s first color photocopier, and could produce images in seconds. The residency inspired Sheridan to develop “Generative Systems,” a ground-breaking course dedicated to exploring the artistic potential of new imaging technologies, which ran from 1970 to 1980.

In her own practice, Sheridan continued to work with 3M. In 1971 she was given access to the C-in-C II system, which allowed users to enlarge negatives and prints, and to heat-transfer images to cloth. Body Print of Mary is part of a series made by instructing a model to move their body across the image plate of the C-in-C, creating a sequence of rectangular color prints which were converted into transparencies and then enlarged on the C-in-C II before being transferred to cloth, resulting in a life-size image. In this example, with its stretched-out figure, the final output is 95 by 16 inches (241.3 by 40.64 centimeters). 

In 1974, a group of works made by Sheridan and Keith Smith using this method were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Critical reception was guarded. Peter Schjeldahl, who tended to be skeptical about technological experimentation in art, described the project in the _New York Times _as an “artistic flop.” The C-in-C was removed from the market soon after, out-competed by Xerox. 

Today, Sheridan’s body prints can be understood as representing a key chapter in the history of copy art, as well as offering an early artistic commentary on the increasing entanglement of machine technology and the human body.