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My practice develops and works through ways of thinking around relationships and hierarchies between mark/material/figure/surface. These relationships, in turn, have potential implications for thinking the site of the feminine within the domain of painting and drawing.
My work investigates what different types of mark making might mean and how these may challenge a logic premised on hierarchical binary oppositions such as presence/absence and figure/ground. The specific concerns of my work are: the creation of a feminine space in/through painting and drawing, the use of materiality and the notion of different "materialities", the notion of blurring or ambiguity in painting and drawing and the use of deconstructive or subversive play. The idea of different "materialities" relates both to the material being used for mark making and to the surface on which marks are made. I have been investigating the accumulation of marks/gestures and the use of thin, disappearing marks that suggest an ambiguous relationship between mark and surface.
The main strategy I have been using in my current work is to come up with marks that form a response to each type of surface used – a response specific to that surface, be it paper, cloth, or a found surface. As a result of this approach, in many pieces there seems to be a close interaction between surface and mark that sometimes leads to confusion between the two – the image partially escapes vision. This strategy has extended to the installation of the work. The play between marks and surfaces within each work persists in the installation of the work, with the walls and floors this time being the surface and the actual works becoming some kind of “mark”.
These ambiguous relationships and “fugitive” images/artworks lead to a partial destabilization of categories. The border or hierarchy between mark/surface begins to destabilize and the edges demarcating or separating works become uncertain.
My work is informed by the theoretical work of Luce Irigaray and Bracha Ettinger. Both these authors theorize the feminine in more positive terms than those proposed by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and my research deploys their theories in order to rethink the feminine within the domain of painting and drawing. |
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