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My practice is involved with making both paintings and objects, that originate from an interest in identity construction, particularly the female persona. By utilizing the stitch or sewn surface, I am exploring historic ideals of the feminine stereotype and how certain activities have been synonymous with a feminine disposition. With changing attitudes towards gender specific behaviour becoming less rigidly defined, I have looked at how hand-made or crafted objects have (in the past) suffered a lesser status than that of the work of art.
Through experimenting with thread and sewing I have considered ideas of decoration but using non-decorative materials, such as human hair, domestic items and dirt.
In using materials such as blankets and thread with their associations to craft, the past and a sense of domesticity I was considering the female's role in relation to these pursuits . The objects that I make have either literal or abstract references to the body. I want the objects to have apparent imperfections, almost as if they have been damaged and hastily repaired, as they have no place in the ideals of perfection. In a sense they became less perfect, and more idiosyncratic with each making. I believe this affords them a greater realism. I am attempting to de-familiarize the body from its flesh and transform it into something other, in a subversive sense objectifying it. The body then becomes an object, more positively, an uncanny object, that lies somewhere between familiar and unfamiliar, objects that retain an echo of their past, both in their shape and materiality. I intended the head casts, hairy faces and blanket bodies to be viewed as slightly subversive self-portraits; they have a sense of me having been in them. So they are in a way both a part of me and not me at the same time, raising feelings of the uncanny.
I am very interested in the idea of the body in a state of metamorphosis and change, but also ideas of attraction and repulsion. The blanket bodies exemplify this, for they are somewhere between reality and non-reality, alive and dead, animate and inanimate. I intended for them to have an air of the ridiculous, almost a collection of grotesqueries! For they are not neat, well-made objects of beauty, that are riddled with disparities and complications, they are untidy and non-conformist.
I have attempted to recreate objects that reflect the alter ego of myself, the self that isn't necessarily on display. I am exploring the idea that perfecting something through repetition is flawed.
The making of these objects has made me ponder what it means to inhabit a female body, what defines it anatomically, socially and politically as female, and what society's expectations are of that body and its procreative abilities.
My interest in drawings also encompasses ideas around the feminine identity and ideas of procreation, by using found images that reference the internal workings of the body and juxtaposing them with recognisable fertility symbols I wanted to make work that had a decorative feel. In amongst this was an attempt to take the less desirable imagery and make it appear decorative and innocuous.
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