- Venue
- Gallery FRANK
- Starts
- Friday, August 10, 2018
- Ends
- Wednesday, August 15, 2018
- Address
- Ebor Studio, William Street Littleborough Lancashire OL15 8JP
- Location
- North West England
- Organiser
- Ebor Studio
Kara’s recent drawing and sculpture employs the process of mirroring – the duplication of one ‘original’ form into its replica image via reflection. Processes involving duplication and reversal throw into question issues such as originality, authenticity, artifice, deception, corollary, opposition and conjoinment.
The mirror image in her work has evolved as a device about which to experiment with a feminist aesthetic, providing symbolism for, and originating from, a desire to find expression for female experience. Most of my work focusses on the body as an instrument with which to encounter with the world via haptic (touch) experience. Corporeal realities essential to women’s experience differ from the masculine experience and differ in terms of its aesthetic precedent and received forms of representation. The feminine body is often posited within the framework of the Abject and located within pre-linguistic states (primitive, immature, unsophisticated and unintellectual); to do with disgust and trauma related to the mother’s body; a “transgressive, ambiguous or intermediary state”. Rather, here the artist explores the empowering potential of transgression as a tool of assertiveness. Transgression is by definition an oppositional position. Opposition as an instructive concept can be found in many folkloric narratives; internal imaginative world vs external practical worlds, transitional positions vs the fixed or permanent, underworld vs terrestrial realities, real or perceived notions of reality.
‘My work exploits the aesthetic and discursive usefulness of counterbalances (for example, contrasts, contradictions, opposites, paradoxes, asymmetry, ambiguity, duality, ambivalence), whilst exposing the masculine bias inherent in binary polarities’.
The artist has chosen to explore the feminine through the perspective of first-person experience and via the internalised body as an alternative to the traditional, patriarchal, external, objectifying gaze directed towards the other. She has developed a number of symbols and making processes which draw upon evolutionary and intuitive methodologies akin to the changing, fluid, visceral, multi-sensory aspect of the lived body. Forms such as the spontaneous blot or 3D equivalent, the blob, draw multiple associations with bodily fluids, dark matter, organic growths, botanical references, the subterranean; which in turn, allude to phenomena associated with nature (and the feminine) in pre-classical mythologies and other female cultures. These forms have multiple references in nature such as; bones (the pelvis/skull), liquids, plant forms, creatures, reproductive organs.
Kara will deliver a talk about her work at the gallery on Monday August 13th at 7pm. Free entry.
