Still working on our Pop Up exhibition 10 Together to be ready for Monday week! I have enjoyed making the skirts for the Maypole dancers from reclaimed paper lamp shades {a bit raggetty with age and me hitting them when throwing the ball for the dog} now cut in half and patched with fabric scraps and wall paper paste. They now look quite jaunty and hold their shape..
The scraps are mostly pieces of Zandra Rhodes fabrics which seems appropriate to the theme of women [in this case] bound by cultural expectations of looking happy and fashionable, yet sometimes aware that the dance has trapped them..
My printed pizza faces need some work however, perhaps they should all be the same, to emphasise uniformity, Stepford wives, but they do not satisfy yet.
I would like to add LED lights in the dark room, to emphasise the false gaiety, reminiscent of Xmas, constantly acquiring more sparkly stuff to show everyone how happy we are.
Matisse dancers should not come to mind, as they are all supple and full of movement. Maybe The nightmarish dancers of Edvard Munch.Or the fairy tale figures of Paula Rego, ordinary yet full of menace.
Have been experimenting with printing from lino cuts on pizza polystyrene bases to provide faces for my Maypole Ladies. The base takes the ink well, if I had more time I could paper the walls with screaming faces……but have to use energy wisely, as polymyalgia means I am exhausted after an hour or so.
I am constructing the Ladies forms with wire, plus lampshade skirts, all a bit Fred Karnos, but we will see. I would like to make their hugely expensive status handbags but I am not sure how to achieve them, in the time scale…..2 weeks at most. It is fun/fear to have this focus, I always enjoy making 3D responses to my imagination, although this is supposed to be a Drawing based challenge. I am drawing in three dimensions perhaps.
I saw a short film on Sarah Lucas this week, she and her work come across as so strong and carefree. ossibly her sense of humour will subvert her position as one of the “important”artists, but she subverts the Art elite anyway. She does not make women “victims” but talks all the time of gender politics and allows women to see themselves as they could be free of cultural expectations of femininity and compromise.
[gallery ids=”52439132,52439133″ work by Rose Wylie, even older than me and winning prizes.
having a go at a lighter approacher to Cultural expectations, the “armour” of fashion, joining the fashion herd so one cannot get picked off as a separate woman…a disguise but then again an opportunity to be creative. Creating one’s own personality/identity that gets subverted by the need to “belong”.
Clothes has probably always expressed status and membership of a group……being an “individual” can make one vulnerable. Shopping therapy is Making Choices, exerting the power to own. A bit hesitant to develop this as it does seem to be attacking the “victim”….but as an artist it releases me to be expressive without the need to be judged [by myself] for my drawing skills.
Is is Mary? Wyeth’s work I saw at the Jerwood gallery in Hastings I have in mind. very annoying to lots of people for it’s naivety, is it too easy? or more difficult? ROSE WYLIE, close but no cigar.
