I suppose my work has always had women at its heart… mothers, daughters (I am one, but I haven’t got one), sisters (not that I have one) and so on…
Women as parents, carers, teachers, lovers, as wives, as people whose role as an individual can be subsumed. I have become more actively feminist as I have got older, more aware of unfairness. I don’t know if this is an age thing, a maturity, an ability to step back from it all a little perhaps, seeing the big nasty picture…
But if my work has ever been sexual, it is almost by accident, a sideways glance. And to be frank I have probably avoided it because I don’t know how to have those conversations really …I don’t think…
But, this morning, unexpectedly, my drawing has taken an alarming turn and I am beset by a string of connected vaginas.
This is the drawing I started after the gig on Sunday, that I wrote of in the last post. This drawing had a title before it started. ‘The Grey Women’. It was for them and for me. I lay down some paint yesterday and came back to it today and washed most of it away and gently dried it off. I had been thinking about hair, styled and dyed, and hair left naturally grey. But when I look at the remnants and stains of the lamp black paint, all I see are vaginas.
So I have to go with that don’t I?
I’ll figure out the conversations when they happen.
