Artist Statement: Thinspiration:: I am currently reworking my Thinspiration series of works in preparation for their final university presentation.... here is the current draft of my artist statement (it will no doubt alter over time)... Thinspiration is a body of paintings and drawings exploring the emphasis on weight and dietary restriction- and the accompanying demonization of their opposites- in contemporary visual culture. Ideological bodily ideals and norms have always been constructed and disseminated by imagery. Such visual material functions to categorize bodies as either ideal, normal, or aberrant- and thereby impacts the perceptions and behaviours of individuals. But today this practice has become far more extreme, both in the sheer volume of visual material that bombards us and in the harshly reduced manifestations of the body that are promoted. Thinness and the practices necessary to maintain it have thereby become internalized as norms and ideals, especially for females, to an extent that is deeply troubling for many. In this series of paintings and drawings I want to disrupt this normalization by exploring, questioning and thus subverting the visualisations of the ideologies surrounding body weight. To do this I am utilising the strategy of juxtaposing references and quotations from art-historical images of the subject with contemporary equivalents to reveal the unprecedented nature of our focus on bodily restriction. The paintings in this series are executed with a technique that strives to find a balance between the historical paintings and the contemporary photographic imagery, drawing together the aesthetics of the two points reference I am comparing. My images are built up in layers- from underpaintings to glazes- referencing processes used by the ‘Old Masters’ that can equally be exploited to capture the clarity, detail, and colour found in digital photographs viewed on a screen. This facture of time intensive oil-painting techniques further serves to reflect the obsessive way in which I approach this subject- from the position not only of a female effected by these bodily discourses but further as a sufferer of anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphia. From this individual perspective I hope to be able to raise relevant, critical questions about an issue that so potently effects the lives of our society’s individuals. shown are the two still lifes and studies for the reworked figure paintings of this body of work
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 09:08:58 +0000
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