Plans, reflection and painting finished

 

Finished this painting - I quite like how achievable it was (after painting over the first attempt) and how the light pulls out. 

Started pulling together my notes and plans for written work.

Spend some time reflecting on where I think I am within my practice and wrote a draft to work with:

Art is personal – try to make it broad but it all centres around experience.

 

My understanding and curiosity about the witch – act as a gateway to explore how I feel I fit into the world.

 

The Other Mother Interview –

What makes you different?  I didn’t say that I am a witch. I can’t say that I am without understanding how we use this word – WITCH.

In our contemporary world, we often feel that we need to know everything about a label before we can apply it to ourselves. Failure to fully understand your label will see you interrogated by groups that identify with your label – we’re all so desperate to have chosen the correct tribe and be an expert in how we fit.

Amongst the pagan and the folk communities, there are accusations of appropriation and grey areas where rituals cross over. Between Christianity and nature-based faiths, the green man and apotropaic marks, act as an intersection, where people have tried to fathom, how they fit.

When I was asked why I am different – I could only reply that I don’t fit. In terms of social norms, I do everything at the wrong time. 

When asked, on the back of our conversation about my interest in the witch and its impact on the maternal, if I have rituals; I paused.

  The one consistency I have ever had to find escape, contentment, balance and the one thing that I have made space for to offer this to my children, is the space of my garden, and I feel that the relationship that they have with their gardens now, devoid of plastic and beacons for wildlife, are one of my greatest achievements.  In short, I hope that I have gifted them contentment and helped them to establish their own relationship with nature*

 

Through my practice, I’ve sought to reconnect the female experience to nature*, and I feel that if I bring plants into my exhibitions, they will balance the tension of my experiences with the contentment and perpetuity of nature.

 

My paintings depict opportunities to say something. They explore my relationships and my experiences. 

 

In foundation, the Veiled Venus embodied a freedom that I felt was stolen from me. This sculpture was oblivious to her surroundings. Platformed, repositioned within gallery walls, viewed and documented from every angle, she smiles and cares not one bit. I became interested in the viewer as much as what I felt she represented. There lay some difficult tension for me. My audience was difficult and my experiences were challenging. 

All through my studies ,my relationship with this work has changed. Level 4 I became aware of the historical culture around the statues creation, I struggled with separating the art from the artist and the sculpture from the muse. 

WACCA made me consider the impact of cultural expectations and social norms on individuals, and my disdain for the muse became less angry.

 

Saville’s ability to connect contemporary maternal experience to the social expectations of patriarchy, and link the matrilineal experience to social expectations set across centuries, through social control structures, feed into my artwork as I continue to explore my own experiences through a revised interpretation.

 

I read, I write, I paint, I show work.. and all the while, I go outside and I spend time in my garden. I sit, reflect and feel content in the only space that I know that offers me this balance.

 

So here we are, as I've been looking to find a way to reconnect my audience to a fluid idea of the female as a part of nature, I’ve been reconnecting all the way through my studies. The tension in my work, that I wanted to find, between the love, anger and rebellion of my experiences, finds a space to connect in the curatorial process.  Paintings, that I referred to as samples, are now resolved threads of memories and considerations, nestled between plants and scents that continually offer balance alongside all our life experiences.  

 

Marcel Duchamp, brought the ready made into the white cube. You can curate anything into an art exhibition space. The space itself platforms it and it becomes the art. Well, nature made this art and I curated it next to my experiences, as the process of learning and reflecting guides my mediums.