In 1967, the artist Rebecca Horn was confined to a German sanatorium for much of the year. On a break from her studies in Hamburg, and making work with toxic glass fibre, she severely damaged her lungs. Bedbound, and as a way of processing the loneliness, Horn made sketches of her own body, adding to which she drew an extraordinary array of appendages, symbols of her own claustrophobia and reliance on the clunky hospital equipment that helped her breathe. In one a huge horn protrudes from the head, in another pendulums hang down from a face mask. There are straitjackets in others, and hoses and pipes attached to breasts in frightening fashion.
When Horn was eventually discharged, these drawings became the basis for some of the artist’s 22 “body extension” sculptures, themselves utilised in performance and film works: in Unicorn (1970) the giant ungainly horn is strapped to a woman’s head as she walks naked through a field; Pencil Mask (1972) is a torturous-looking headgear, from which a series of pencils spike out, worn by Horn to create drawings; Finger Gloves (1972) grotesquely elongates the performer’s digits to the ground, a work rumoured to have inspired Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands.
