Desiring Knowledge Painting

Victoria Cantons is a cross-disciplinary artist and curator with a primarily drawing/painting practice that is informed by a multinational and multicultural upbringing and a background in photography and stage drama as well as the fact that she is also transgender. She has exhibited internationally and her work is included in numerous private collections. Cantons lives and works in London. Artist Statement As a trans woman I have felt stigmatisation many times, it is this that has pushed me to to question how much freedom do we have? I want to understand as much as I can about what it means to be human. The human condition, gender, and social identity are at the core of my work. I am not a transgender female artist but rather an artist who happens to be a woman and transgender. We are not just the clothed person we present to the world. We have many faces. We are defined by our response to experience and our relationship with each other. In the wake of #MeToo, what do we make of masculinity and femininity? I am interested in themes of power, identity, and male and female perceptions of each other. These aspects connect us all and yet we are also unique individuals. Painting, for me, is in part about exploring that and finding ways to better understand my relationship to the people close to me and to the world about me. Whilst the works are not made from memory they are linked to memory. I use notebooks, sketchbooks, found and made photographs combined with a multi-national, cultural and religious background –my parents were Spanish and French, Catholic and Jewish– to create an exploration of identity, self and representation. Painting exists, for me, at the intersection of three, uncertain elements: language, the world and the self. Language is never wholly mine; the world I can only know in a partial sense; the self is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two. Perhaps the correct balance and weight to be given to these elements is never fully in my control. It is this self — whose boundaries are uncertain, whose language is never pure, whose world is incomplete — that I try to paint to and from.