Reposting of essay from Her Circle ezine

An essay about my art practice that I wrote for an online women's art journal Her Circle Ezine. This covers the scope my work from just after my graduation from undergraduate studies to my last body of work entitled "Gravid".

"The primary focus of my art practice has been to address gender-related issues and represent the experiences of women. Inspired by the second wave feminists, who coined the phrase ‘the personal is political’, my work reflects my personal experiences filtered through the lens of art history, mythology and popular culture. Many of the female figures that appear throughout my work are, in fact, self-portraits. I have observed that large numbers of women artists have embraced the self-portrait as a means of representing their own histories and experiences as being distinct from those of men. While I cannot claim to be an art history or feminist philosophy scholar and therefore can't verify that this is a practice seen more often in the work of women artists, informally it does appear to be the case. It is unquestionably a feature of my own work.

My earliest work, however, did not involve the use of self-portraits but rather drew on images appropriated from outside sources such as anatomy textbooks. This work was monochromatic and very minimalist in approach. During this time period ( 1992 - 98 ) I created “The Three Graces” and the “Objects of Desire” series. This work would be best described as highly academic in nature, as it was greatly informed and influenced by the anti-pornography writings of such 80s feminist luminaries as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. These were the years immediately following my graduation from university when I was still fuelled by the political radicalism of youth. While I still self-identify as a feminist, at present I would describe myself as more of a liberal feminist than a radical one.

In the interest of clarification, I would like to briefly outline the difference between liberal and radical feminism. A liberal feminist seeks to abolish gender inequality through the use of legislation and societal reforms. In essence, they chose to work within “the system” in order to change the system. Radical feminists, however, view this same “system” as the problem. Radical feminist theory views most societies as based on patriarchy—a societal construct that privileges men over women. Gender equality, they argue, is impossible within the framework of such a society and therefore the society must be fundamentally altered. The writings of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were instrumental to the development of radical feminist theory, and in particular their criticism of pornography which they linked with rape and other forms of violence against women. The anti-pornography writings of Dworkin and MacKinnon were core reading in the Feminist Philosophy class I attended while an undergraduate student at university and as such held a great deal of influence in the formation of my feminist views.

Over the course of my early art practice, however, I experienced a conflict between the anti-pornography view of radical feminism and the strong anti-censorship beliefs I held as an artist. While I did perceive a causal link between certain types of pornography and the subjugation of women, I was not—nor am not—against pornographic images as a whole. Sexually explicit imagery belongs to the spectrum of human experience that an artist may chose to depict, and this depiction should be free from the limits of censorship.

Additionally, I observed that on certain key issues—pornography and the legalization of prostitution being two of these—that the radical feminist left and the socially conservative right were often in agreement, and this was an alliance with which I was greatly uncomfortable. Therefore, over the years my feminist beliefs have adopted a more liberal leaning and include what is now termed “sex-positive feminism,” meaning that I oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults.

While my early work was inspired by feminist influences, it also quoted from the classical texts. For instance, the triptych entitled “The Three Graces” took it's name after the famous art historical grouping of three female nudes that stems from classical mythology. Artists of no less stature than Raphael created their own versions of the Three Graces, mainly as an excuse to render the female nude threefold in one composition. In my version of this subject, I appropriated images of naked women from anatomy textbooks and imposed a “black-bar” of text across their eyes, the type of black bar one used to see across the eyes of women in pornographic material. The thought behind this action was to make explicit the essentially pornographic exchange between the nude female subjects and the imagined viewer.

My work frequently uses self-portraiture as a creative point-of-departure. I often adopt the role of characters from classical or biblical texts in these self-portraits. The process of inserting myself into the role of a character creates a level of displacement from what is often psychologically challenging subject matter. In the case of “The Bitter Seed” 񢉏񮖠), I combined family photographs of myself as a child with the ancient Greek legend of Persephone as a means to address my personal history of childhood sexual abuse.

Persephone was the Queen of the Underworld in ancient Greek mythology. She was a tragic figure who was abducted by Hades and forced to remain in the Underworld as his queen after having eaten the seed from a pomegranate. Hence, the pomegranate fruit was initially incorporated into my artistic lexicon as a potent symbol of sexual subjugation. (I have continued to use the pomegranate as a repeated symbol in my work but have since removed the initial negative connotation. It now represents a more positive, female sexual energy). The displacement of myself into the role of Persephone allowed me to exorcise my victimhood as a child without literally representing my own story.

Two years after the completion of “The Bitter Seed,” I returned to the same subject matter with the series “St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins” ( 2002 - 03 ), in which I masqueraded as thepatron saint of schoolgirls. In this new series, I no longer represented myself as a victimized child but as an adult returning as a conquering heroine. I borrowed from the tradition of St. Ursula as a protector of schoolgirls and embellished her character until she more closely resembled a superhero or an avenging angel, replete with sword and angel wings. The series played out as a sort of spontaneous psychotherapy and apparently struck an emotional chord with critics and audiences alike.

The “child brides” featured in the “St. Ursula” series are symbolic ofthe innocence, coupled with a burgeoning sexual curiosity, inherent in prepubescent girls. The image of the young girl dressed to receive her First Communion is a potent—if culturally sublimated—sexual image. The white dress and veil, reminiscent of a western bride, and the receiving of the “host” are all psychologically and symbolically weighty.

The red that frequently accompanies these young “brides” is not the symbolic blood of Christ, but the literal blood shed by girls and women: the blood of menstruation (i.e. sexual maturation), the blood that is often shed at the loss of virginity, and the blood shed at childbirth.

My version of “Salome” also belongs to the “St. Ursula” series. According to the Christian texts, Salome was the step-daughter of Herod who was instructed by her mother to ask for the head of the imprisoned John the Baptist. There is an apocryphal tradition of this story that implies an incestuous longing on the part of Herod for his step-daughter and includes an erotic dance performed by Salome to manipulate Herod into accepting her morbid request. Hence, the character of Salome has been granted the ultimate femme-fatale status in Western art history. My version of Salome is loosely based on Oscar Wilde's play “Salome”, in which Salome is enamored with the Baptist and places a posthumous kiss on the lips of his severed head. My version takes the macabre eroticism of Wilde an outrageous step further, blending a sense of playfulness with a legitimate expression of female rage.

The change in the aesthetics of my work, from my monochromatic early work to the brightly-coloured works from the “Bitter Seed” and onwards, was one that came about more through my work as a graphic designer than through any sudden shift in feminist/academic philosophy. In my “day job” as a graphic designer I was often called upon to create bold, eye-catching designs with bright colours. It was only a matter of time until the commercial art I created during the day seeped into the personal artwork I created at night. My signature “stained glass style” which employed the bright blocks of colour and thick black outline of the figures, like the leading found in actual stained glass, was first developed in the “Bitter Seed” series. Stylistically, this series recalled the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, an artistic movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century that included the stained-glass window in its aesthetic milieu. The tragic Greek heroine Persephone, whose character I adopt as my own in the “Bitter Seed”, was also a favourite subject of the Pre-Raphaelites. The stained-glass style remained a feature of my work for two subsequent bodies of work, including the “St. Ursula” series. As this series involved my impersonation of a Catholic saint, the continuation of the stained-glass style throughout “St. Ursula” was highly appropriate. The body of work that followed “St. Ursula”, a series entitled “Gravid” ( 2003 - 06 ), was an exploration of pregnancy and motherhood that was driven entirely by the birth of my first child. As this new content did not warrant the continuation of the stained-glass style, the black outlines soon vanished.

My last series “Gravid” continued my diaristic approach to image-making with an exploration of motherhood from the viewpoint of a professional artist. While the decision to have a child is invariably a momentous one, this decision is made more complex when the woman is also a professional artist. On a broader level, “Gravid” presented an honest, unsentimentalized view of motherhood that challenged the clichéd images often found in the mainstream media.

“Me & My Doll” ( 2004 ), which is a drawing belonging to the “Gravid” series, makes reference to a 1940 self-portrait by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. This drawing was created in response to the ambivalence I felt with regards to parenthood. As is often the case, I chose to embed my personal experience into the visual language of art by recreating the historical painting of Kahlo (although the compositions of the two works differ slightly). The woman depicted in the drawing (myself) finds herself at a crossroads in her life where she experiences the transition between having responsibilities only to oneself to having the responsibilities of childrearing."

-- Apologies for the rather abrupt ending. This essay was cobbled together from a series of Q&A e-mails which I had with the art editor of the ezine. It was late in my last pregnancy when I wrote this, and I simply grew tired of working on this essay.