Since the
invention of photography, painting is less concerned with specific imagery and
more about how the artist remakes that imagery. Found images and film stills
provide material and my work explores the contrast between the painted surface
and the mechanical quality of the source image. The painting Muse (Arbus/Bourgeois) is part of a series of celebrated women artists satirically
referencing the tradition of ‘honorary’ portraits, alluding to the fact women
struggled, until the rise of feminist theory, to be accepted within the art
system. The disembodied nudes, Docile Bodies, affirm Sylvère
Lotringer’s observation that “Art has to look inward to justify itself to
counter its definition by extrinsic conditions of the market place”. The paintings were informed by
Michel Foucault’s theories of the objectification of the body which is so
prevalent in late capitalist society and evidence that “a docile body may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved” to which women are especially
vulnerable.
With digital
technology the recording of our lives is instantaneous and I am interested in
how that impacts on our sense of time, place and memory and want to demonstrate
that the medium of paint on canvas has the capacity to engage the viewer in an experience of seeing.
