Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun
I was given the names of these artists and I’ve been fascinated ever since. Claude Cahun was an androgynous figure on the margins of surrealism, who considered herself “third gender” – neither male nor female – and whose small oeuvre consists entirely of carefully dramatised photographic self-portraits. Cahun is now considered one of the key artists of our age – despite the fact that she died in 1954 – a sort of patron saint of the Instagram era, when “everybody” is exploring their identity, gender and body image through uploaded self-portraits.
Here Cahun is paired with Gillian Wearing, for a show that plays with the idea of a self-portraiture as a kind of mask that conceals as much as it reveals. “Under this mask, another mask, I will never finish removing all these faces.” Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.
I have been playing with the theme of genderless portraits before, such as with my shaped paintings, and this couple truly fits in well with what I believe in and what I want my art to display. As well as the playing around with gender binaries, I can’t help but notice how oddly similar they are to the images from the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, where people dressed up and posed with objects and props. I found that this was incredibly interesting and had to have these photographs named for what had inspired me.
The Sex Museum
This museum is certainly something that has heavily inspired me. It had a mixture of the history of sexuality as well as modern symbols, such as Marilyn Monroe who is often remembered as “that sexy, curvaceous woman”, and not her talents. Looking at the vintage photographs caught my imagination, as I was shocked at how sexual and vulgar they were over a hundred years ago when I thought that pornographic material like this was a modern thing, when, actually, this material has been around for many years. This made me realise that it was naive of me to think that heavily sexualised women weren’t a new thing, as women have been sexualised for the male gaze for centuries. I decided to combine these images with the pinhole camera by using my Inside/Outside idea of women being criticised for taking images of themselves on social media, simply because they are doing it to feel empowered and proud. This will be done by taking ‘vintage’ looking pictures of myself and other women, in a heavily sexualised but empowering way to convey the message that women’s bodies aren’t obscene or unnatural and women are allowed to do what they please with them, whether the want to hide or show it.
Linder Sterling
While researching for feminist artists, I came across Sterling who’s been called a radical for confronting gender construction and its ties to capitalism and culture. Sterling found inspiration in sexualisation, desire, morbidity and non-conformity in order to free women from their social constraints. But producing art that challenged the notions of ‘what it means to be a woman’ didn’t come without its controversy. “When I made my first collages in 1976, Rank Xerox refused to photocopy them. There were only two places in Manchester that you could get photocopies made and I’d already been turned down by the other one,” Sterling said in 2012. “I had to send the collages to Jon Savage, in London, where he managed to have copies made. I wouldn’t fancy my chances walking into Prontoprint tomorrow with the new collages and that’s fine – lines have to be drawn somewhere.”This was a huge breakthrough in women in art and how they were portrayed. She used material that was fine to be used for the male gaze, but wasn’t even allowed to be printed as art. From looking at her work, I often scanned and printed my pinhole photographs to create collages in my sketchbook. Linder Sterling is who inspired me to do this with my work, as I’ve been writing an essay for constellation on the punk era and feminism, all of which influences a lot of her work. Linder Sterling is a well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, and is known for her montages, which often combined images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity. Below are a few examples of her work:
For my final piece in Field, I decided to pursue with my new-found love for the pinhole camera. I wanted to combine the pinhole effect with the Sex Museum I saw in Amsterdam as well as my subject module, which is based on feminism/sexism. I decided that the way to do this was by looking back at the photographs I saw in the Sex Museum, such as the one below;
-and use the poses and subtle pornographic material used in the images. I did this because women are often criticised for posing sexually in pictures, even if that just means showing a bit of skin. This is because women have been told to never express their sexuality for themselves all throughout history, and must always be modest unless a man (probably a husband) wanted otherwise. Therefore, taking pictures of myself, in a similar style to these images in a museum that were aimed for men, offered a sense of empowerment and control over my body, symbolising that women are allowed to express themselves in this way. The pinhole played a huge part in this because the images it captures look vintage, as they come out black and white, and had a soft look to them, thus letting me play with the look of the museum images. The images I took were of me, mostly in my underwear, and a few of me covering my breasts, which went with the theme of expression and regulations on women’s bodies, such as on social media (where you can post videos of a beheading but not a female nipple). I also wanted to make it personal by using comments I’ve received, but also using comments that other women have had against them. I used things like “you should cover your ‘boing bongs”, and “I grope women because they give me a look”, which were sent to me in a private message. Below are many of the images I created from the pinhole camera:
During the making of these pinholes, I often scanned and printed them to create collages in my sketchbook. Linder Sterling is who inspired me to do this with my work, as I’ve been writing an essay for constellation on the punk era and feminism, all of which influences a lot of her work. Linder Sterling is a radical feminist and a well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, and is known for her montages, which often combined images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity. Below are a few examples of her work:
I decided to use images of the degrading and nasty comments/messages with the photographs to create a strong link between them, as well as misogynistic words using ink. As well as all of these, some photographs worked well in my favour just from how they turned out, as some came out by blurring out my breasts completely, as if they were censored:
This is how I decided to display my work on the wall, with the images spread in a way that it’s simply a line going down. As well as it being aesthetically pleasing, I wanted it to display how equality isn’t on the rise as many of us believe, but is actually going ‘down hill’, as many of the comments I had collected proved. I also augmented the images while they were on the wall, and the augment displayed different misogynistic and nasty comments/messages I’ve been given or had found, which are all shown below;
For this collaborative project, I looked into Frank Stella’s work as I knew he worked in abstract colours and prints which worked perfectly with the brief. Stella was an early practitioner of nonrepresentational painting, rather than artwork alluding to underlying meanings, emotions, or narratives, and has remained one to this day. Working according to the principle of “line, plane, volume, and point, within space,” Stella focuses on the basic elements of an artwork – colour, shape, and composition. Over time, Stella succeeded in dismantling the devices of three-dimensional illusionism; his shaped canvases underscored the “object-like” nature of a painting, while his asymmetrical Irregular Polygons explored the tension between the arrangement of colours on the flat surface of the canvas as well as the optical effect of the advancing and receding forms.
Baroque artists such as the early-seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio developed illusionistic “tricks” that convincingly suggested that their subjects emerged out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. Several centuries later, Stella took such innovations one step further by literally extending painting into the third dimension in his painterly reliefs, which entered the viewer’s space with their incorporation of protruding materials.
I wanted to re-create his relief-styled collages myself by using the geometrical prints made with contrasting colours I created with my group by, firstly, looking into what sort of abstract forms I could create by myself and, secondly, adding whatever knowledge I gained form this to a collaborative piece. I first of all wanted to create something quite wild and abstract, which was completely opposite to the clean, geometrical shapes we had made. I cut out random pieces and began creating an almost sculptural piece from building out of a print from both sides.
I definitely think that it worked well in bringing my idea and Stella’s style into play by being as sculptural as it is. I also wanted to create some kinetic energy into the piece by hanging it up and spinning it, which again I was pleased with because it was totally different to what I’m use to doing and let me further my knowledge on what shapes and colours work together and which don’t. I translated these ideas into our collaborative piece by cutting out natural shapes, layering and putting them against opposite colours. I do think that the collaborative piece is very different to my solo piece, however, the exercise was very much needed for me to see how things worked together in order to have a successful outcome next. We decided on making a sort of mountain landscape which contrasted as well as went with the geometrical theme; the mountains resembled the geometrical triangular shapes but the natural theme went against it.
I decided to look at Nancy A. Breslin, who is a Washington, DC based photographer who specializes in photographs taken with pinhole and plastic cameras for this project. For some projects she also works with alternative photographic processes or in video.
I find it interesting that she has a whole collection called ‘pinhole meals’, which sounds basic and average, but the photographs have come out eerily blurry, which fascinates me. A seemingly normal thing we do everyday can become this ghostly image made from a simple pinhole camera. Breslin stated, “For the past ten years my main photographic tool has been a pinhole camera, and I have found it equally adept at capturing ghost-like portraits (my “Pinhole Diary” series”), landscapes (amusement parks), still lives (the bathroom interiors of my “Amenities” project) and abstractions (“Galaxies” represents artifacts of the aperture’s diffraction). Most of my work is a visual form of journaling, and the gentle distortions of pinhole exposure capture scenes unlike what I actually saw, but memory also distorts the past.”
We worked with this eerie concept by looking into skeletal bodies because we found that the images looked like x-rays when negative. We then experimented by just taking photographs of our hands, creating ghostly images of them because it was hard to keep our hands perfectly still while the image was being taken. However, this only added to the haunting photographs and let us create sharper, contrasting drawings on them while experimenting. This is what we were busy making;
We saw that our work was becoming almost architectural and almost looked like maquettes for larger than life pieces, therefore we started to look at the artist and architect Peter King. He has made beautiful pieces in the past, but what caught our eyes were his archways and how magnificent and interesting they looked just standing up on their own. We took this idea from looking at images like this example;
We thought that if we created tall clay pieces that stood up and could fit together like a jig-saw, but not obviously, would they have the same effect as King’s work do? Of course, these were far more grand and ours were very much abstract and minimal, but the similarities between how they stood interested us very much. We then started to take our outlines of the silhouetted still lives and began cutting out shapes, which funnily enough, resembled things like faces and how the countries on a map fit together perfectly. Other people also offered their interpretations, which was interesting, because we could see what other people could see, even when the outlines weren’t meant to look like anything at all. This resembles Kin’s work in the way that they are mostly made with patterns, such as geometrical patterns, which resemble perhaps cultural patterns.
Looking into architecture and clay has certainly opened a new door for me, as I had very little experience with both before this project. I will try to look into architecture for inspiration or context again, but it was the clay that excited me the most! I’m thinking about perhaps using it for one of my Inside/Outside pieces by creating a clay desk with my feminism theme in mind, or even creating abstract clay body parts to develop my shaped paintings even further. Either way, this project has been very helpful by bringing me a flood of ideas.
Robert Hooke, Illustration of Thyme Seeds, 1665.
This print was shown to us today, and is a print of what Hooke saw when he looked through a microscope to look closer at thyme seeds. What he saw is what he drew, and he found that the closer he looked at them, they always looked entirely different, which is a very interesting concept. What I took away from this was that perhaps to develop something I’ve done shouldn’t be by adding more to it or increasing its size, etc, it should sometimes be by looking further into the subject and think outside of the box, and to keep looking into it, as it will always come out different. I think I’ll be doing this by looking into the history of what I’m doing, which is criticising women on the internet, by looking at perhaps the first ‘selfie’ (picture of someone taken by themselves). By doing this, I will gather a very interesting and thorough project, and it should help me figure out what to do for my final pieces.
A talk was held in the heart space on International Women’s Day and many artists from many different areas in the creative sector, incluiding Davida Hewlett, who inspired me to try to use more photography and film in my work. She used motherhood to inspire her work by doing things like swapping the roles of the child and mother, as seen below. I was also intrigued by how so many women were inspired by things that weren’t ‘typical art’ or by ‘typical artists’, but instead by films and singers, such as David Bowie. This has caused me to think outside of the box and perhaps start analysing the films, music, theater, etc that I watch/listen to and consider how I could relate them to my work.
Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh has always been one of my favorite artists and I was delighted to finally see his work in real life.I personally couldn’t wait to see the famous ‘Sunflower’ painting, as it was one of the first paintings that I was introduced to. We looked around and found how his art changed as his mental state changed and deteriorated, from his self portraits to the letters he sent to his family. I saw his young adult life when he just began drawing and painting for a living and how his artist friends influenced his art, which I could relate to somewhat from being in art school. This also reassured me that it wasn’t a bad thing to share inspiration and ideas, since it could create something as magnificent as Van Gogh’s work. I also really enjoyed his paintings while he was at the asylum, such as the gardens around it. They were seemingly his escape from his mental illness and the reality of it, which could definitely be something that I might look into.
Anne Frank House
This is the single picture I took in the Anne Frank Museum. I was blown away by her story and being where it all happened, and it was all very emotional and heartbreaking. I though that, even though she was a writer and had a very unfortunate end to her life, her life was a lot like the message I try to convey in my art. Her life is like a warning to what could very easily happen again, especially now with the rise of racism and discrimination since the US election and Brexit. I took the image above because a few faces of Anne’s family are blurred; an almost eerie reminder of how brief their presence or time together alive was, merely captured by an old camera. This photo, one of many, show how quickly things can change, which is something I’d like to do with my art work, but of course, as an obvious warning and not a heartbreaking past.
The Sex Museum
This museum is certainly the one that has inspired me the most, as it had a mixture of the history of sexuality as well as modern symbols. Looking at the vintage photographs caught my imagination, as it shocked me how sexual and vulgar they were over a hundred years ago when I thought that pornographic material like this was a modern thing, when, actually, this material has been around for many years. I want to combine these images with the pinhole camera field project we did by using my Inside/Outside idea of women being criticised for taking images of themselves. This will be done by taking ‘vintage’ looking pictures of myself and other women, in a heavily sexualised but empowering way to convey the message that women’s bodies aren’t obscene or unnatural and women are allowed to do what they please with them, whether the want to hide or show it.
Rijksmuseum
This was the last museum I visited and by far the most beautiful visually. The museum has on display 8,000 objects of art and history, from their total collection of 1 million objects from the years 1200–2000, among which are some masterpieces by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Johannes Vermeer. The museum also has a small Asian collection, which is on display in the Asian pavilion. However, the area that intrigued me the most was the contemporary floor, full of strange and interesting art. My favourite piece was the sculpture of the vagina/womb, seen above because it was amusing but so very surreal. It was made by Ferdi in 1968 and is titled the ‘Wombtomb’. Ferdi wanted to create a playful and liberating ‘environment’. The sexual symbolism of her furniture sculptures literally becomes palpable when one touches the soft synthetic fur. The Wombtomb lent itself to ‘happenings’, ‘performances’ and interaction. The vulva-like opening forms the entrance to the sheltered interior. It is simultaneously a cosy tomb and a womb.This idea is as impressive as the piece itself, almost making the people who interact with it ‘re-born’. I have been thinking of creating vagina art but was always unsure of how to do it, but seeing this piece has definitely lit up my idea bulb.
“Feminism”.
That word often triggers feelings of hate, anger and confusion. Not (usually) by the feminists themselves, but to those who do not wish to know its true meaning. I discovered that the more openly feminist I became, the more friends would turn and become angry with me. For a long time, I didn’t like them back and blamed them for not seeing what I see. It took me a while to realise that what is so obvious to me might not be obvious to everyone.
Every time I posted something women-related, I’d see a notification from one of my friends at the time. I’d click and see that it was yet another comment declaring how wrong I was about what women go through and that my personal experiences or those of my other friends and family doesn’t matter because it’s all ‘made up’. I could never understand how so many people could ‘get it’, but some, including a few of my friends, just couldn’t. I would even get angry personal messages claiming that I wasn’t allowed to be afraid of walking home in the dark because I expose my cleavage in a few pictures on facebook, or that I’m not allowed to not want to be groped because I might give someone a specific ‘look’ and they might not be able to help themselves. This was highly offensive to me, as it was to men since, you know, they aren’t monsters who can’t control themselves. I couldn’t understand how someone could disrespect their gender so much and make it sound like they were all out to get the women who didn’t behave accordingly.
Thankfully, it isn’t often that I receive messages like those, but there is something more worrying lurking, especially here in the UK, and that is how sexism (as well as all other discrimination) is a lot more subtle. It’s on the internet where people will speak out about how women aren’t worthy, while in actual situations, it’s their behaviour and attitudes that scream sexism. For example, the same friends who would gang up on me about how I’m not allowed to be shocked about sexual assault rates for women in universities on facebook wouldn’t even look at me for longer than a few seconds when I tried asking them about it in person. To me, this was an eye-opener about how many Brits often ‘deal’ with discrimination; even though they might think something, they are only willing to scream and shout online, behind a screen.
Anywho, feminsim hasn’t only shown me the bad side of society, it has shown me the kindness and support of people, especially my friends and family who have been there for each other through the most horrible of times. It has got me through a lot of issues from living with a form of PTSD to a simple catcall. It has shown me that I can be there for all of my friends, whatever it is, as they can be there for me. It has shown me that being a victim of something doesn’t make you any weaker, any less powerful, or even much of a victim at all.
I make feminism a part of my life through activism by using my art, going to rallies and debates, and, yes, the internet. Today, although many people are quick to discriminate online, many who believe in what I believe in, whether it be on feminism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. aren’t speaking up. To quote Malala Yousafzai on this fine day, “When the world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful”. People often think that they’ll bore a conversation if they choose to bring up politics, or lose friends on facebook if they choose to share something, when standing up for something doesn’t even have to be that. Say you see someone receiving unfair treatment on the bus, call it out. Say someone passes a discriminating comment about your co-worker, call it out. Say if a friend needs your support over something that has happened, offer it with open arms, as crinjey as it all may sound. Discrimination is still alive and well all over the world. How many more Trumps can we take? We need to hold each other up.
Happy International Women’s Day 🙂
saratrouble 