It’s safe to say that my three years studying as an Undergraduate in Fine Art have been the most useful, interesting and developmental years as an artist so far. Years ago I read read Rowan Newton in an interview, stating that your years as an art student are the most valuable, because never will you have so much freedom in what you create, and when. When I embarked as a fresher in my first semester, I had trepidation about how true this could actually be – with looming deadlines, confusingly named modules and assignment objectives, I was worried that I had voluntarily entered myself into another school-setup, where I would be prescribed a medium, a theme or a subject to consider through art.
How wrong I was.
Although there were rules, guidelines, and the ever dominant concern for top marks, the 1,095 days that followed were indeed, the most expressive, challenging, creative and free days of my life to date. I read books that I loved, books that I didn’t – and still don’t – understand, I cried (a lot), I made friends, made art, made crap, made a mess, realised a scary amount about myself, and somewhere along the way, I learned to begin to define who I am as an artist – and as a human being.
Right, soppy bit over.
Let’s cast ourselves back to July 2018. I had just received surprisingly wonderful marks for my second year of studies, the weather was hot, I had holidays booked, I had finished a brilliant, interesting and exciting project, and frankly I was feeling great. Yet, already, I was apprehensive about beginning my third and final year of studies. Throughout the second year, I had embarked on an in-depth and brand new (to me) investigation into the meaning of value, fame, and originality. I had embarked on a seemingly never ending quest to understand immanence, judgement, the art market and authenticity. And I had created conceptual and abstract works that would have terrified or disgusted me in equal amounts just a year prior. Although I had absolutely loved my work throughout Studio Practice 1 and 2, and knew I definitely wanted to research and discuss similar concepts in my dissertation, I simply felt that my practical exploration of this specific matter had culminated in my final assessment portfolio, and had been tied up in a nice little, complete package. The thought of filling another year with the same concepts and approaches seemed impossible, and quite frankly a bit stale. So where to begin, where could I possibly find inspiration for what may be my most important year as an artist to date? Nowhere, that’s where.
So, I decided to begin by creating and researching work that – I considered – to be without intention or thought. Researching artists who used chance, natural phenomena, or powers out of their control, in order to create work. I was intrigued by the notion that something could be created without knowing what it may be, or even planning to create it at all, yet I was still enthralled by the idea of value, notoriety and appropriation. My investigation into chance and intention was extremely eye-opening and I immediately learned there was much more to intentionality that literally moving a paintbrush to create a shape. However, in this investigation, I found myself missing painting – just as I had done in previous years when my work had become more digitally based. In an attempt to merge the two areas of interest, I decided to try and create random paintings. By selecting imagery with no real context – mostly photos from my phone – cropping it and painting the usually blurred or poorly focused, I began to create abstract, vaguely pointillist or expressionist paintings. At the time I could have no concept at the ridiculous importance this experiment would have on my growth and development as an artist.
The weeks that followed, found me continuing to create these abstract works, experimenting with multiple mediums, and sometimes using the paintings themselves as new images to then crop and repaint again. In doing so, I became interested in image decay, abstraction, and the repositioning of media – both aesthetically and contextually. All this was incredibly interesting and enjoyable, but I found myself questioning where the images came from, if they should have a relevance, and if so, what that relevance and meaning would be. During the Autumn of that year, I was lucky enough to be able to volunteer as an assistant for the SPILL festival in Ipswich, where I was able to take part in, help out with and view a multitude of new, unique and intriguing artworks/performances. The whole experience was not only crazily useful to my understanding of how many artists work and live, but also made me reconnect to concepts that are absolutely vital to myself as an individual and hence, to my artwork. Themes or feminism, experience and viewer/art relationship stirred around in my mind, and I was excited by the notion that I could incorporate these concepts into my own work, giving it a new context, message or discussion.
So where to start? If you know me well you know that I was automatically drawn to the feminist narrative of many of the SPILL projects, and considered how I could use my abstract/manipulated/cropped paintings to discuss or represent feminist issues. In recent months, body autonomy – particularly female – and diversity within the media had been hitting the headlines throughout the country and globe, and having struggled with body image and self-confidence for many years, it is a topic I have always been interested in. So, I decided to continue my investigation into the cropped/abstracted painting style I had found, by taking images of women I admire and using their photographs as the source imagery for my crops. This began a 3 month dedication to the painted canvas, creating dozens of works using imagery from social media, personal archive and publicly submitted imagery, focusing on diverse figures, women identifying what feminism meant to them, how objectification felt, how social media was being used – both supportively and detrimentally – as a platform to showcase bodies, and, ultimately, to explore the presentation of the female body in painting.
As this practice developed, I found myself considering if this notion of body positivity was the message behind my paintings, and if so, what did this mean? Reading on and around Laura Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze, as well as Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality showed me just how problematic it could be for me to attempt to completely re-establish the socially engrained constructs of the patriarchy, especially that of the gaze, objectification and female beauty. Researching and viewing artists like Venetia Berry, Sarah Hardacre, Helen Beard, Celia Hempton, Elly Smallwood, Anna Tsvell, Robert Mapplethorpe and Thomas Ruff, made it clear that the female body, and especially the sexualised female body is just as prominent a figure in contemporary art as ever.
In addition to my interest in these notions of message, feminism and intention, I also began to consider my creative process. A visiting lecture from Simon Carter sparked an intense appreciation for the importance of drawing and process within artistic practice and brought me to an intrinsic realisation in relation to my work with the crop, painting, abstraction and image manipulation. Carter spoke about how he translated his original sketches into paint, how the artist has a unique viewpoint on the work as they know the ‘original’ and how he used real colour to influence his expressionist palette decision. Looking back, I am in awe of how important this talk was to my development as an artist and how key this was in me understanding the re-contextualising or re-imagining of a work.
With these considerations developing, I started to consider the media I was examining, how having this message of ‘body positivity’ and celebration could be viewed, and how problematic it is to attempt to reverse of alter the (fe)male gaze that we all experience, in life and in art. Therefore, I decided to broaden my horizons, and with a new-found adoration for Celia Hempton’s work, extend my source material to include pornographic imagery, from print and digital outlets. As my work extended into a far broader range of provenance, and began to incorporate nudity, I examined further how drawing impacted my work; producing a collection of stand-alone drawings in a similar stylised fashion to those which often support my paintings. In doing so, I was able to distinguish the investigations into the presentation of the body, upon which I was embarking. I could see the links between my paintings and drawings, I could identify the similarities between the presentation of the clothed woman on social media and the nude woman in Playboy, I could find shape and colour in the crease of an elbow, or texture and tone in a Photo-shopped breast. It was scarily late in the year when I began to identify quite how blindly I had been missing my true interest: The representation of the female body. More specifically, how it is viewed on different platforms, how important context is to the perception of it, how it exists in painting – both classical and contemporary – and how we as viewers and creators, relate to the existence of the painted female body. As these ideas and concepts broadened, I decided to write my critical review on precisely this, focusing on the importance of context, and the blurry line that separates some contemporary painting and explicit porn. As I recognised the similarities between my paintings, once context and recognisable qualities had been removed, I could see clearly how the way the female body is presented and perceived, is potentially a universal ideology, enforced by the social conditioning that created the male gaze. Hence, my work is – and probably always was – concerned with the presentation and perception of the female body, with reference to the importance of context, patriarchy and condition of the gaze.
Continuing to paint at an obsessive rate, during the beginning few months of 2019, and my final ever semester, I found myself with a portfolio of nearly 60 paintings, all inspired or based off images of the female body, either from porn, social media, personal photographs, submitted images, mass media and archive. Sitting with these works, seeing them together and alone made me see how they spoke to each other, how the more obviously figurative works gave reference to the more ambiguous pieces and how the body was unified through paint, and the lack of external context made me focus on what is ultimately my interest: the body.
This notion of context lit the match to the culmination of this entire module and semester: A realisation that I was fascinated by the way in which viewers respond to nudity within painting, how they contextualise and accept nudity through it’s sanctification within art, and ultimately how intrinsic context, medium and perception are to the reading of the figurative painting and more specifically the female painted nude. This interest led me to continue to research artists like Beard, Hempton and Smallwood, while also considering the more controversial works of Robert Mapplethorpe and Thomas Ruff, which consider notions of biopolitics, gaze, power and body ownership. This research, along with the key reading mentioned above and detailed in my bibliography, led me to develop and construct my critical review around the notion of the blurry line between art and pornography. This essay led me to clearly define the intention of my final body of work; to discuss the context and reaction to the painted nude, when devoid of context.
With this clear intention and discussion in mind, and continuing to create, explore process and consider future directions for my practice, I began to consider the presentation of my work. Celia Hempton had been an enormous influence to my practice this year and I had grand aspirations of recreating her feature wall effect with drips and splatters and colours. After discussing these plans with Susan and Jane, trialling multiple designs and styles in my degree show space, I ultimately found that a plain grey background worked best to emphasize the colour and form of my paintings, whilst also presenting them in an unusual manner, to incite movement and awkwardness in the viewer, as explored in the crucial critique with Susan and Gary.
Ultimately, I am extremely pleased and proud of the work I have created this year, and quite frankly in awe of the journey I have been on in understanding my own interests and practice and how notions of context, judgement and medium, are – and really always were – the driving forces in my artistic creation.