Sally Butcher

My Art practice focuses on human conceptions of beauty, especially in relation to women, as they are mediated between art, culture and the viewer. I am particularly interested in formations of gender, power and the manipulation of desire used in contemporary mass media and often appropriate such imagery within my own work, to explore its power of seductive distortion and its ability to structure our way of seeing through everyday consumption.

Within my pieces I employ techniques of drawing, printmaking, photography and painting, at times combined with hand-sewn & collage elements. I use the subjects and objects associated with feminine beauty; faces, bodies, hair, mixed with lace, ribbons, veils and flowers. These are cropped, reframed, covered and uncovered, or separated from their usual context and brought under intense scrutiny, attempting to distort and derange, to challenge our everyday assumptions of female beauty.