I’ve recently been working on my Artist CV as it’s about time I made one specifically to send to future employers for a creative career in the near future. I found it challenging trying to figure out what information and experience was useful to apply to this CV, as I have learned many sets of useful skills at various different paid work, but they aren’t necessarily creative jobs. However, I was able to finally finish it for now and I’ll hopefully be able to update it monthly.
I’ve been looking into different artists in Cardiff who explore feminism in their work. One I came across was Hanan Issa, who is a Cardiff-based spoken word artist, poet, and writer. She’s a bi-racial (Welsh and Iraqi), on-the-fence feminist Muslim woman in a hijab. Her work covers many topics but mainly focuses on the female Muslim experience. She recently collaborated with artist Nasima Ahmed, who says; “I wanted a space where girls like me could be represented in normal situations and be relatable. I also like to use my art as a way to voice my views and express feelings.” Nasima’s illustrations aim to fill the lack of representation of Muslim girls/hijabis in the mainstream media.
And her work does just that. Evidently inspired by pop art, Nasima portrays Muslim women through witty, unapologetic and colourful illustrations. The artwork also deals with topics ranging from social anxiety and alienation to self-love, culture and gender inequality.
https://www.walesartsreview.org/feminism-is-not-for-you/
I also recently came across this blog for the Cardiff Feminist Network (https://feministcardiff.wordpress.com/), which is a forum for feminists and their allies to get together regularly for discussions and socialising, and to support feminist activism in the Cardiff area. I’ll be keeping an eye on what they post and if they hold any meetings, as I’m sure this will only broaden my knowledge on feminism, and give me the opportunity to speak about my artwork and gain constructive criticism, as well as help me with networking with feminists in Cardiff.
Good Evening,
I wasn’t too sure who to email regarding this, but I’ve already spoken to Anthony Shapland briefly about this exhibition (this is Sara by the way, a recent volunteer!). Esyllt George and a few students and I have been in touch with the Women’s Art Association about organising an exhibition on the theme of empowerment, with the statement as following;
“We are a group of women researching into what it means to be empowered, using art as our chosen vessel and are exhibiting our findings in support of the Women’s Art Association in Cardiff. We are especially open to women of diverse backgrounds and welcome all cultures and beliefs. Empowerment can take all shapes and forms, thus this exhibition will be an open discussion of pride, individuality, and reinventing negatives for all women involved.
Our main objective is to hold an exhibition, but to also have workshops in different mediums of art and life drawing sessions of a diverse group of women. For the exhibition, we encourage our participants to send us three examples of their work, and we will ask you to send us one of these pieces (unless the participant wishes to send a body of work for a series). Submissions will be on the end of January for each of these events.
We want to open a dialog between women in all shapes and forms to offer their opinions on what makes them feel empowered and to encourage change. From these events, we’ll be able to form new relationships with a wide-range of women and will hopefully create a community where we could discuss future works and ideas relating to women.”
I’m emailing in regards to possibly using the back of the space of G39, where our recent Affordable Art Auction was held, if that would be possible? We’re hoping to holding the exhibition for a few days at the end of February and to hold a life drawing workshop before the opening, perhaps in the cinema room? Of course, absolutely no problem if not.
We are planning on deciding what artwork is shown in accordance with the space we are able to exhibit in, in terms of the sizes of the artwork specifically, therefore the location in terms of size is totally adaptable for us at this stage.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email and let me know if I’ve missed any details you’d like to know!
Kindest regards,
Sara Treble-Parry
We met up again with Es to discuss where we were at in terms of planning the exhibition. I let her look at our statement and she thought it was strong and that we didn’t need to change it, which was great news for us. I let her know that I had spoken to g39 about using their space for the exhibition and that we only needed to finalise our plans for it to know if we’ve got it or not, and Es added that I should tell them that we’d like to be given a space first and then work around sizing for each piece we put in after. We’ve also decided on having a week-long exhibition if we can between the 22nd and 28th of February, and that will include the workshops we plan on holding too.
Our next step is to put up a post on A.N. and ask for submissions under the banner of women of CSAD and Creative Exchange, and to also ask artists in Cardiff if they’d like to get involved. Es told us about a performance artist who is usually based in Bristol named “Bean” who has looked into self-confidence in her projects in the past, and that she could be very useful to chat to, and even perhaps get involved with our project.
As said by the artist herself, “Make Me Up is an exploration of both the achievements and complications of contemporary feminism. It sets out a discussion of how women’s bodies, voices and minds contend with a world that often prefers you to be slim, silent and subservient”.
Make Me Up takes place in a seductive and dangerous place where surveillance, violence and submission are a normalised part of daily life, where we see her using robotic single eyes scanning their expressions and watching what they’re doing, suggestive abuse with facial bruising and screaming, and the voice of Kenneth Clarke narrating almost everything through a woman’s body. The film explores how the media, on one hand, can be a great way to express and explore identity through the use of pages like YouTube. On the other hand, social media can be seen as a gilded prison that encourages women to conform to strict beauty ideals by perhaps those exact platforms.
The artist chose Kenneth Clark’s voice because of its evident associations with class and patriarchy. Rachel’s interests in found audio originate from ideas surrounding what senses form our identity, her use of different voices form a collage that changes the audience’s perception of the film’s tone. This is seen in Kenneth Clark’s pedantic and over-pronounced accent coming through the body of a woman stirring up themes of power and control. Make Me Up’s vivid compositions are informed by Rachel’s interest in “making a feminist film which looks at the female representation in art history”. The predominantly pink aesthetic is a comment on the “canonised view of art history which is very masculine”, subverting the male gaze into a doll-house aesthetic, looking like a naughties Barbie film.
I especially enjoyed the “temptation” scene, where the women compete against each other with the temptation of eating a sausage from a tree. This is also the scene that we see the woman with the bruised face, making it simultaneously carry the metaphors of domestic abuse, Eve tempting Adam, eating disorders, and aggressive control over women’s bodies. I think this scene alone will greatly impact my work, which is to do with the sexualisation of foods, especially considering the food Maclean chose was of a phallic shape. This could potentially lead to how I could further progress my work in a similar way, by drawing attention to other aspects of my research into my work on food and emojis.
As a group (myself, Sacha Reid, Megan Fraser, and Catherine Flood) we’ve decided to meet up to discuss what exactly we want as a statement for our upcoming exhibition in February. We decided to each write a small paragraph of our own, and then present them to each other to be able to write one final one that represents all of our ideas into one.
Mine went as follows;
We are a group of women researching into what it means to be empowered, using art as our chosen vessel and are exhibiting our findings. This exhibition will thus be an open discussion of pride, individuality, and reinventing negatives, while collaborating these ideas through our various mediums of paint, digital, and performance art. This will hopefully in turn open a dialog for women to discover what they believe makes them feel empowered, and that it could be truly open to their individual personalities, beliefs, and experiences as women.
Megan’s one;
Kitty’s one;
An exhibition about empowerment of women through art. Women taking ownership of there battles by reversing their negatives. Encouraging women to be themselves.
Sacha’s one;
An exhibition exploring different perspectives of what it means to be female in contemporary society. By taking ownership of our mind and body and reinventing negatives, our aim is to show the many forms female empowerment has to offer.
This is the final outcome that we will present tomorrow for Esyllt George at our follow-up meeting;
We are a group of women researching into what it means to be empowered, using art as our chosen vessel and are exhibiting our findings in support of the Women’s Art Association in Cardiff. We are especially open to women of diverse backgrounds and welcome all cultures and beliefs. Empowerment can take all shapes and forms, thus this exhibition will be an open discussion of pride, individuality, and reinventing negatives for all women involved.
Our main objective is to hold an exhibition, but to also have workshops in different mediums of art and life drawing sessions of a diverse group of women. For the exhibition, we encourage our participants to send us three examples of their work, and we will ask you to send us one of these pieces (unless the participant wishes to send a body of work for a series). Submissions deadlines will be at the end of January for each of these events.
We want to open a dialog between women in all shapes and forms to offer their opinions on what makes them feel empowered and to encourage change. From these events, we’ll be able to form new relationships with a wide-range of women and will hopefully create a community where we could discuss future works and ideas relating to women.
I invigilated at g39 throughout the day of the auction, then volunteered to help with the art auction set up in the evening. This gave me plenty to do throughout the day, as many of my fellow students were coming in and out, and I offered a helping hand wherever I could. I helped by greeting guests, always keeping a count of who was coming through the door, the curation of the lights, and any questions anyone had about the building. I also had three of my paintings up in the auction, which were all sold and made £57 in total for the final exhibition, which I was ecstatic about. In total, the auction made around £1,360 which is an impressive amount made in one evening and has made a huge dent in the amount of exhibition funds we need.
These photos below show the space we used for the pieces displayed, including the bar, the bids board, and the amount of people who turned up to support the evening. The success of this auction means that we will certainly be holding another event closer to the time of the exhibition, potentially next term.
Personal Statement
Assessment Personal Statement 14/12
Documentation
Painting myself as a Camera Girl
Fruit machine – developing the emoji idea for food as a fetish
Contextualisation
Critical debates: Sexism, Censorship and Politics in Manchester
Megan Winstone and Red Flannel Films Talk at g39
Booster Week Posts
Setting up my account on MyFreeCams – Booster week 17/10
Volunteering for “Sock it to me” by Janet Blackman – booster week 18/10
Going live on MyFreeCams for the first time to eat a banana – booster week 18/10
After looking into sex work last year, I decided to take another route by taking a more playful idea of how we, millennials and other younger generations, have sexualised emojis, especially food emojis. Looking into this, I found that we have always sexualised food, whether it is in art, film or novels, and this is a progression from that.
I first of all looked at using sex work to prove the sexualisation of foods that represented phallic objects, such as bananas and aubergines. However, I did not want to take such a serious route of using anything that could potentially bring any harm or be insensitive, and thought that making a profile as a camera girl would work. I ate a banana live and documented the comments I received, which did conclude that it was turned into a sexual innuendo, which I knew would happen in the environment I chose to do it on. Would I have had a different reaction going live on Instagram, Facebook, etc? In my opinion, not hugely, but the comments would not have been as crude and obviously sexual as I wanted them to be for the purpose of my work.
I developed these ideas into fruit machines, keeping with the playful side of my work. I painted this series inspired by photographs I found online of fruit machines; some had game shows on them, and some were called “Chav It” with a cartoon of a “Chav” on the top, and others were standard fruit machines. This sparked the idea of using my camera girl research for this series by using myself to replace the advertisement or the “Chav” joke on the fruit machine, and even use comments and messages I received by viewers when I went live as a way of documenting what I had found.
I also experimented with wax and oil paint for my camera girl research, which include photographs of Medusa and a photograph of me the night I went live as a camera girl. They surprisingly came out well, therefore I thought that including these alongside my painting series was important to show the development of my work as research paintings in my most recent exhibition, “Get Loose”.
I have also been looking at fruit machines and how I could potentially use that for my work, as I used cherries as “comments” in a recent painting and it was received reasonably well by my peers, as well as translated my ideas well. Because of this, I am hoping to carry this through for the next few weeks, as it would certainly be in keeping with being playful and flirtatious. This might potentially lead to buying an old fruit machine and change the fruit symbols into emojis and see what I can come up with, but this could prove to be difficult if it is a big machine, but en exciting project for next term.
We looked at various examples from artists, such as ones currently exhibiting at Artes Mundi, as well as previous students at CSAD to see what were their strengths and weaknesses, then were paired up to make each other’s statements knowing what we knew from this introduction. I was paired with Mike and wrote this (below) from the information he had given me;
Mike’s statement from me
Reflecting on time, history, and the sense of nostalgia, Mike concerns himself with everyday situations and scenes that may seem small to the viewer in a normal situation but will give the viewer time to think about them in his huge, ongoing panoramic painting. It will not only be about past events, however, as it will also be about current ongoing events in his life, as he will be taking a year on this painting, therefore will reflect his time at university, documenting his everyday thoughts while he’s studying. This sort of reflection will enable him to also enjoy the smaller things, which is exactly what he wants the viewers to take from his piece.
He is currently documenting these events digitally through photographs and videos, however the painting will enable him to delve deeper into the people’s expressions, detail in landscape, and even the activities they are doing in his documented photos and videos. With the use of chalk and acrylic paint, they will supply him with both adequate speed and detail for this challenge. Mike’s aim will be to capture people as individuals with deep and detailed histories, and perhaps will blur backgrounds to intensify this to the viewer. The sheer amount of work going into this piece reflects the time being spent thinking about these people and the scenarios.
And this is what I made in response to what Mike wrote about my work;
From Mike’s statement of my work
A huge element of human evolution is communication. Communication is evolving constantly to make human interactions more successful and follow the standards of the millennium.
My work has progressed from the new technological trend of emojis. This is emphasised in the way emojis have a different meaning when put together in a specific way, creating sexual sentences entirely on their own without the use of any words.
Many images of foods have turned into sexual symbols in advertisements, and there is also historical exploration of using foods as sexual objects. Everyday more and more people use food emojis as a compelling and appropriate way of communicating and forming conversations around sexual topics.
I am currently working with the medium of paint to illustrate these sexual emojis through the use of fruit machines, creating the right combinations that are used to “win” on dating apps in order to achieve a sexual conversation.
I found this workshop really useful, and realised a lot of different ways to portray my work and the context of my work in my statement, such as writing in first person, being descriptive and visual when giving examples, and editing my statement every month or so.
saratrouble 