Uncommon Ground > Land Art in Britain 1966-1979

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Susan Hiller, Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists: Addenda II, Section 6: A rock-bound coast 1977

Susan Hiller, Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists: Addenda II, Section 6: A rock-bound coast 1977

Following on from the last exhibition The World Turned Upside Down, Buster Keaton, Sculpture and the Absurd the next touring Exhibition at the Mead Gallery opening 17th Jan 2014, Warwick Arts Centre is Uncommon Ground, “the most comprehensive exhibition of British Land Art to date. Featuring the work of 24 of some of the most important artists and artist groups working in the UK between the mid-1960s and late-1970s, the exhibition demonstrates how the term ‘Landscape’ was questioned and transformed by artists during this period to become the ground for radical artistic experiment.” The exhibition has been curated  Joy Sleeman (Slade), Writer and Curator Ben Tuffnell (Author of Land Art), Nicholas Alfrey (University of Nottingham). Artists featured include Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Ian Hamilton Finlay. This exhibition dovetails with current reading regarding Feminism, Sexuality and Gender in Literature, Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women, where the Landscape itself is character, backdrop and conduit, the route by which the narrative travels although of course women are almost conspicuously absent from this exhibition save one, Susan Hiller, whose incorporation could be perceived as curatorially problematic.

Text quoted from http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/whats-on/2014/uncommon-ground-land-art-in-britain-1966-1979/. Image reproduced from http://www.artnet.com, accessed 18122013.

Metamorphosis of the Feminine – The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter and Paula Rego

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Image by Paul Rego

Image by Paul Rego

Drawing on the violence of her Portugese background and it’s folklore Rego’s world conjures up allegorical tales of the physical and psychological violation and repression of feminine experience through often surreal, psychologically, metaphorically and symbolically charged imagery. In these claustrophobic settings and often domestic interiors these female figures, cut off and contained by the frame of the image, often dominate the scene.

Rego’s Women have powerfully robust physiques and the characters in her paintings, drawings and prints are often portrayed in uncompromising and contorted positions including bending, kneeling, lying, squatting, cavorting, undressing. The abject appears in the form of urinating and defecating. Like Smith the female and the bestial are often interchangeable. There is something of the carnivalesque and the grotesque about Rego’s characters, the dancers that appear regularly in her work draw as much on James Ensor as they might on Degas. Rego has also made controversial work about female genital mutilation and abortion. Continue reading →

Metamorphosis of the Feminine – The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter and Kiki Smith

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Kiki Smith, Rapture, 2001, Bronze, 67 1/4 x 62 x 26 1/2 inches Edition of 3

Kiki Smith, Rapture, 2001, Bronze, 67 1/4 x 62 x 26 1/2 inches
Edition of 3

“It’s a resurrection/birth story; ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a kind of resurrection/birth myth.”

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a collection of short stories in which Carter re-appropriates the fairy tale in the service of the feminine to re-work patriarchal constructions of gender from within the genre. Female protagonists constantly transgress the boundaries of the patriarchal and the received definition of the fairy tale moral in relation to the feminine (i.e the innocent female child and the sacrificial female). The primary story after which the collection is named is a re-working of Bluebeard by Charles Perrault and was influenced by Carter’s readings of the Marquis De Sade. Carter asserts that Sade “put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women …” [1]. This extremely brief presentation aims to highlights connections between the representation of female experience in Visual Art and The Bloody Chamber. Continue reading →

The view from Nowhere: Dislocated, re-located, discombobulated

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[sic] amore

[sic] amore (© Gammie)

Hello Every Bodies

Since I am now post MA, RCA life I have to confess the life element of this statement is sorely lacking due to the fact that I have re-located (to a house on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere that feels positively rural after living in London for 3 years). I am simply left dangling post MA, RCA……Rather disconcertingly I can actually hear myself thinking, this re-location may be good for the soul but it may also be that I am slowly committing creative suicide. Anyway to take hold of one’s dislocation, discombobulation and direct one’s dangle I am exploring those areas of my practice that somehow never saw the light of day on the MA in practice but were fully present in the thesis (Barthes, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray et al). I am undertaking a Social Studies Certificate in Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in Literature and the study of women’s writing and how it has engaged with, and continues to transform and challenge the politics of gender, sex, and sexuality. Continue reading →