On the Beach Print

Subject to my role as both a woman and a mother, the work derives from intimacy, however subjectivities are objectified as I blur narrative with abstraction; a focus on colour-making. I’m interested in the spatial injunctions between domesticity and the 'avant-garde', or normalised cultural associations, and so I both suggest and question basic assumptions within art culture, but also in the context of wider society. Considering existential identity, and the Marxist idea that one is determined by circumstances; economic, social, and so on, my work acts as both a proposal into, and retreat from, the contemporary art world. I'm interested in the nature of retreat in this sense, as authors such as Herbert (Tell Them I Said No, 2016) suggest that a large part of the artist's role in today's professionalised art system is being 'present'. Counteracting this, my most recent work mimics an alternative perspective: a minimal exploration of 'feminine' formalism, considering this existential theory and questioning basic assumptions and associations within the art world. Much of the work is made by mixing traditional painting medium such as pigment, oil, synthetic polymer, with domestic materials such as household paint and artificial colour. The play between art and domestic; public and private; suggests the tensions in where and how the needs of the art world and needs of the artist, diverge. Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) suggests that the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe, and ‘when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art’. With this, my work brings parodic associations to the conversation regarding contemporary art, with high and low ‘knowing’ references from the grand narrative of modern culture.