Skeleton

A 2020 aluminium-plate lithograph from Yokoo's Melbourne-period output, Skeleton renders a skeletal form rather than a specific narrative scene, sitting within his broader investigation of bodily memory and the body as a vessel for accumulated experience. Aluminium-plate lithography offered him a faster, more responsive surface than traditional stone, letting him work close to a drawing's first impulse while still retaining the granular crayon textures characteristic of the medium. The reduced palette and skeletal subject align with the quieter, ruminative register that distinguishes his work from his more graphic contemporaries; the figure reads not as anatomical illustration but as a meditation on what remains when soft tissue and identifying detail are pared away. Made the same year as Lighthouse (DNW) and Elwood, Skeleton belongs to a tightly clustered group of plate lithographs produced around the close of his BFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, when he was consolidating a personal vocabulary of trace, residue and outline that would carry into his later cotton-paper and stone work.