At last! After a few hours battling through I have managed to update my biography and artist statement. Feels like I have taken some heavy weight from my shoulders. Thank you to artist Chris Shaw Hughes, http://www.chris-shaw-hughes.com who has helped me with the editing, proof reading!
Let’s move on,
Pasta, tuna, olive oil and salt for lunch.. and a sore eye from staring at the computer almost all night.
Mercedes Ferrari
Born 1979
Lives and works in Brighton, UK
BIOGRAPHY
Mercedes Ferrari was born in Spain in 1979. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton with a BA (Hons) in Sculpture (2013) before progressing onto the MA Fine Art course at the same university, where she is currently studying. Her MA studies, funded by an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) scholarship, has greatly enabled her to continue developing her art practice. She has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows including; Solo exhibition, Work Programme 22, Community Arts Centre, Brighton (2013), Light Thickens, Vyner Street Gallery, London (2011), Bi-annual Birth Rites Collection competition-shorlisted artworks, MediaCityUK, Manchester (2013), Selected Works Reel Show, Saatchi Gallery, London (2013), Winter Pride Art Awards 2014 shortlisted artworks, CHART Gallery, London (2014), Winter Pride Art Awards 2014, Tobacco Docks, London(2014), Office Sessions, 4th Floor, Anchorage House, London (2014), MA & Other Postgraduates 2014, Atkinson Gallery, Street, Somerset (2014) and Vanity Unfair, Desperate Artwives, The Crypt Gallery, London (2014). She was awarded with the Santander Community Engagement and Volunteering Award, University of Brighton (2013) for her project, the Artist Parents Group, and shortlisted for various competitions including; Bi-annual Birth Rites Collection competition, University of Brighton Alumnus Award (2014), British Women Artists Award (2013), People’s Choice Award, The Signature Art Prize 2013/2014andwas a runner up for Winter Pride Art Award (2014).
ARTIST STATEMENT
With wry humour, raw energy and visual puns, Mercedes Ferrari’s practice explores human behaviour and relationships within the domestic space. Violence, gender politics, sexuality and maternity are recurring themes. Her work, which is composed of sculpture, drawing, video and performance is suggestive and provocative with cartoon and stage-like arrangements filled/packed/littered/liberally strewn with sexual content and strong emotional narratives. She deftly combines the handmade and the readymade – more often than not using domestic objects – creating experimental anthropomorphic figures which reference the human (especially female) body as she attempts to deconstruct the social stereotyping of women, such as the objectification of women as domestic fixtures and the mother.
Ferrari, always obsessed with finding new ways in which to experiment with form, pattern, colour and composition, continues to challenge her own sculptural language. She finds inspiration in the tragicomedy of daily life, the absurd, childhood memories and folk culture.
Her work is informed by the theories and aesthetics of the carnival and the grotesque by Mikhail Bakhtin, and how these are used as a means of social communication in art. Using the philosophical ideas on human existence behind the Theatre of the Absurd and the improvisation and experimentation in the Comedia dell’Arte, Mercedes Ferrari constructs a playful and imaginative world of her own upon the rubble of the world to which we all belong.
