Letter to Peter Parker, 2015 Sculpture

Letter to Peter Parker is the result of four months of Patel hand-writing a thank you letter to the man behind Spider-Man’s mask, Peter Parker. These words, intricately patterned to form the costume are stretched over a cast taken from the artist’s body. In the letter, which repeats many times over, Patel twists Parker’s biography, personal and physical attributes to match his own upbringing and identity. Where Parker puts on the Spider-Man mask to hide his public identity, Patel thanks him for creating a mask that diverts the attention from his primary aim of disguising his skin colour. Where Parker earns an income from taking press photographs of himself crouching as his alter-ego, Patel thanks him for inspiring his own existential practice of self portraiture. The sculpture also pushes Spider-Man’s characteristic crouch into the squatting posture that ties the artist’s family physically to India.