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Embracing Monsters # 1 Weird Sisters

30/5/2017

Crab Claw Gorgon, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

Weird Sisters come in threes. The witches upon the heath, the bat-winged Furies, dog-head Harpies, swan-like Graeae and snake-haired Gorgons. These sisters are named Avenger, Jealous, Unresting (Furies), Dread, Horror, Alarm (Graeae), in short, everything and anything that frightens or disturbs; while the gorgan Medusa and her sisters Sthenno and Euryale, are so monstrously ugly that to look upon them is to be petrified.
And, yes, all these monsters are women.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus places the Graeae and the Gorgons on Kisthene’s dreadful plain where ‘neither does the sun with his beams look down upon them, nor ever the nightly moon’*. In fact Weird Sisters never do belong in the community. They are banished from the kingdom to deserts and wastelands; living, like so many outcasts, beyond the pale. People have always preferred to banish 'monsters' and these times are no different to any other, look at Brexiteers' views on EU Freedom of Movement or the ideology of ISIS. It's hard to find any example of modern conflict that lacks the basic (and base) desire to cleanse territories of 'foreign' influences. It’s also hard on the level of the individual human body to find any example of modern concerns that don't equate non-standard appearance with monstrousness. (see January’s Blog).

Medusa's First Kiss, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

There are ways of looking at and embracing our differences, which is fortunate considering fewer lives are devastated when we're guided by tolerance and inclusivity. It is in this spirit that I have begun a series of new drawings about the Weird Sisters of the plains, imagining them as whole people rather than symbols of all that is fearful, people who might from time to time want to visit new places and try new things. What, for example, might Medusa's first kiss look like? Or the Graeae's first trip to a nightclub?
I am, however, decidedly against moving Medusa and her sisters to the city full time. Psychologically, I don't believe wildernessess are places to avoid or to fear because they are where we exist undisguised, in all our uncertain vulnerability and individual truth. Perhaps in this series, the Belles will visit the outlands while the pariahs go to the ball... I'll keep you posted!

Fish-Tailed Gorgon and The Handerkerchief Tree, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

Incidentally, I wasn’t sure why I was drawing mythic monsters until I remembered something I read years ago by James Hillman. He describes wildernessess as places where ‘we never learn, cannot help, fall back to and cry from again and again’, as an essential (if uncomfortable) landscape of human experience.**

* Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound C5th B.C.
** James Hillman, Abandoning the Child, LOOSE ENDS, Spring Pubications, 1975

OTHER BRIDES

10/1/2017

CHILD BRIDE oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

BARBIE BRIDE detail, oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

BARTERED BRIDE oil & pewter leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

DRAG KING BRIDE oil on wood 41x41cm Natalie Sirett 2016

MISS HAVERSHAM oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

OPHELIA detail oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

MRS. ROCHESTER oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

PERSEPHONE oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

In her article Thinner, Smoother Better Rhianon Lucy Cossett reflects on the common although largely unspoken practice of retouching 'selfies' before posting them online. Picture software, now standard on mobile phones, can lighten your skin, slim you down, enlarge your eyes and fade out those blemishes. Girls and young women are making full use of all editing options, creating aspirational, ‘post-truth’ versions of themselves for public consumption. Selfie Culture tends to be viewed as proof of the narcissism of the young, but something more disturbing is at play. Alienation from the actual physical body must occur when falsifying its image is the established norm. On this point, Cossett’s youthful testimony is poignant:
'Those of us who know what it is like to grow up in a culture with a value system that places your body above all else will know just how much energy this preoccupation expends – how it bleeds away at your ability to act in the real world, to achieve things.'

Hollowed-out beauties in fairytales are the women who win. Smooth-skinned, correctly proportioned girls capture princes’ hearts and become the bride. They receive love, social status and the victory of being chosen above, and envied by, all others. The selfie-manipulator may have similar goals in mind but if your beauty is rated by public consensus, there’s little hope of ever gaining autonomy and, as increasing incidence of eating disorders and self-harm demonstrates, it is getting harder for girls to cope with the threshold into their adult bodies. For our girls to have a chance of manifesting unashamedly in the world the obsessive judgement of their bodies needs to stop and we know this! We know that life is a complex and substantial business that takes so much more than a well-cultivated facade to live well, yet beauty and happiness continue to be conflated, making beauty a girl’s heart’s desire.

Thinking around and along these lines, I began this series of portraits: THE BRIDES. I started with flawless, feminine effigies The Barbie Doll and The Madonna but soon found myself getting interested in the less-than-fairytale narratives of brides including Miss Haversham, Ophelia and Mrs. Rochester, all three abandoned and unchosen. Persephone, the girl compelled by her appetites to live half her life in darkness, also became a subject. Other paintings feature child brides and bartered brides. Twin portraits show a drag king bride distancing from her femininity while a drag queen bride yearns towards his. The portraits themselves are intentionally schematic in style. Subjects sit rigidly, within patterned frames or areas of polished metal leaf, reminiscent of early icon paintings of saints and martyrs. The aim is to make portraits that have a universal or iconic quality.

June 19th, 2016

19/6/2016

Political Grace: Imran Qureshi at the Barbican Curve

11/6/2016

Where the Shadows are so Deep, 2015, Acrylic on floor and wall with 35 paintings, gouache and gold leaf on wasli and paper

Imran Qureshi
Where the Shadows are so Deep
18 February 2016 - 10 July 2016
The Curve, Barbican

Floor detail

Where the Shadows are so Deep by Imran Qureshi, leads the viewer on a theatrical, multi-sensory journey. Exquisitely painted miniature landscapes, lit by spotlights, hang at varying levels along a huge, curved corridor. The further you walk, the darker the space becomes. It is only once the eyes adjust that you become aware of red spillages underfoot and on the walls. They suggest pools of blood until closer examination reveals petals blooming out of the gore. These flowering motifs are sometimes referred to by Qureshi as 'blessings on the land'. It is a particular experience to step on them, around them.
Approaching the luminous miniatures, made with acrylic and gold leaf on traditional wasli paper, we find landscapes, populated by trees and flowers; each designed with a curved horizon-line echoing the curve of the space. On a technical level, these paintings are very fine. Qureshi underwent rigorous training in traditional 16th Century miniaturist techniques at the National College of Arts in Lahore.

In contrast to the discovery of flowers that mitigates our encounter with the blood stains, viewing these landscapes (referred to by almost every reviewer as 'jewel-like') becomes more and more unsettling. Little things are wrong. They are not the idylls they appear to be. Some contain tiny flurries of blurred marks, others are presented with the gum-stripped edges where the artist tests his paint still visible. The natural events depicted have potentially sinister outcomes; those vines that twist so elegently around a trunk, may eventually choke the tree. What are those patches of withered branches? Why are those roots exposed?

In an interview accompanying the show, the artist speaks of the 'idea of landscape which is full of life...nobody knows, within a second, just by a little act of terror... it transforms.' Qureshi's work often references the political situation in Pakistan but his intention is not to make work parading brutalities, rather he seeks to name the universal presence of violence. As he explains, “...there’s a lot of violence around me in Pakistan, but then there is a lot of violence all over the world. Violence is not a strange thing or a stranger for anyone."* In Where the Shadows are so Deep, we find life as well as darkness even in the deepest shadows of The Curve. Qureshi's achievement is that he communicates so much more about the nature of violence because it is shot through with such shimmering beauty. It is an extraordinary achievement AND it's there until July 10th. Don't miss it.
* read more

Tales We Tell Our Daughters

27/4/2016

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I have just finished painting a series inspired by the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, ASCHENPUTTEL. In this pre-Disney telling it is a wishing tree growing from the mother's grave, and not a 'Fairy Godmother' that provides Cinders with the requisite clothing to attract her prince. Cinder's wicked stepmother and sisters are not ugly; they are 'fair of face but black of heart'. In the final contest to win the prince's hand, one sister cuts off a toe, the other her heel as they try to squeeze into that fragile, transparent glass slipper. The fight to fit the shoe closely parallels our contemporary zeal for cutting and shrinking our bodies through diets, cosmetic procedures and other, darker compulsions. The correct size = happy ever after - doesn't it?

These tales we tell our daughters contain some monstrous female stereotypes. Good mothers are usually dead while stepmothers will stop at nothing to remove the competition of a stepdaughter. An early version of Snow White casts the murderous queen as the girl's actual mother, while in Charles Perrault's extra gory version, the queen salts, cooks and eats the wild boar's lungs and liver, she believes belonged to her stepchild. Women who are not compliant, young, virginal, beautiful and of the requisite size, appear as witches, harridans and crones. If motherhood hasn't killed them off it turns them to jealousy, dissatisfaction and wickedness; a metamorphosis that surely informs our modern infatuation with youth and the hiding of signs of aging on the body and childbirth on the body at all costs.

In Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, Karen is punished for her vanity in wearing red shoes to church. The shoes weld to her feet, dancing her through night and day into a graveyard where she sees an angel guarding the church doors. "Dance you shall!" he told her. "Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door, and wherever there are children proud and vain you must knock at the door till they hear you, and are afraid of you. Dance you shall. Dance always."

The angel here highlights another requirement: beauty should exist without pride or vanity. To the long list of acceptability criteria, a girl must add modesty, natural grace and, I would suggest, a bird-like appetite - unless she is providing for the appetites of others*, to the list of qualities necessary to be a woman deserving of a happy ending.
* See August Blog The Two Faces of Eve

Into the Mystic

24/1/2016

BP: A Walk Through British Art at Tate Britain covers 500 years of British home-grown talent. I'm not sure that I've ever felt, or wanted to feel, particularly British but, as I wandered from room to room, I was surprised to discover that I was looking for something, a common characteristic that is reflected in my own practice.

I'd be surprised if there's much academic consensus over what defines British Art. When I studied Art History, schools of French, Italian and German Art seemed to have much clearer national characteristics. However, this might be due to my outsider perspective. At the Tate, the aspect that resonated most strongly was a sense of mysticism, especially in paintings of landscapes and narratives.This quality is by no means universal but it is there in a significant minority of British artist's work: Samuel Palmer, William Blake, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Joan Eardley, to name but a few. Fondness for the fantastic isn't confined to the visual arts scene. It's there in literature too, in folk tales, illustration, film making and music.

Van Morrison himself, who provided me with the title to this blog: Into the Mystic (if you don't know it have a listen), is a Belfast Boy. It's oddly comforting to feel, as I paint my fairy tales, that I may be rooted in some kind of native tradition!

Exhibitions: You can still catch my work on show at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh until next Sunday, February 14th.

Unspeakable Things

15/11/2015

I was in the mind-set before Friday's news of the Paris attacks began to break, worrying about an old friend who has to say goodbye to his comatose, dying sister, and wants to know what he should say (this is more important to him than whether she can hear him or not). Then came the news of all those loved ones who will never go home, where no last words can be spoken because that opportunity has been suddenly and violently taken away.

I spent the best part of a year recently, working on MAP OF THE WORLD, responding to those early modern altar pieces showing Earth, Heaven and Hell in glorious detail. The lowest tier of my piece deals with hellish subject matter. Some images show the private hells of unhappiness and addiction but it is pictures of ideological atrocities that dominate. These include a topical portrait of Jihadi John, alongside the neatly stacked skulls of the Killing Fields, torture scenes at Abu Ghraib and the train tracks into Auschwitz. Hovering in the sky between skulls and poppy is a newly invented hybrid character made up from the symbols of all major religions. I include them in hell because, whatever the good and moral intentions of organised faiths in theory, their practice has unleashed many of our most unspeakable actions as human beings.

MAP OF THE WORLD

Detail MAP OF THE WORLD

Detail MAP OF THE WORLD oil, clay and gold leaf on wood 2014-2015

A Definite Space

30/9/2015

SWALLOW'S NET, Indian ink on Japanese paper, 50x70cm, Sirett, 2015

This summer's exhibition of Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes at The Royal Academy was a testament to the delights of a box. I've rarely heard so many visitors at an exhibition exclaiming, even laughing out loud as they explored the floors and walls, niches and ceilings of these spaces. Usually viewers at exhibitions of 'great art' are more silent, focussed on printed, audio and the occasional human guide. I wondered why it was people felt able to comment so playfully and freely. Is it something in a box’s form, its openings, closings, conceals and reveals; in the drama of its narratives from Pandora’s Box and Portia’s caskets to hidden treasures and The Box of Delights?

A colleague of mine once told me that she collected boxes almost obsessively for several years. One night, looking at these empty containers cluttering her already crowded home, she concluded that she was trying to buy space!

Whatever the reason I have always loved boxes and making artworks with them only increases that fascination. I've blogged in the past about the fantastic narrative possibilities in a box, where the many faces offer a natural framework for a series of images. Recently, I've started thinking about those surfaces unfolded, flattened out into their net designs and have begun a series of BOXED BIRDS, exploring a process of wrapping a bird around the net, inside and out and the pleasures of working inside and outside the box continues!

Untitled, Joseph Cornell, 1936

PELICAN'S NET, Indian ink on Japanese paper, 50x70cm, Sirett, 2015

The Two Faces of Eve

8/5/2015

“Being a good girl, a perfect girl, can kill you fast or it can kill you slow, flattening everything precious inside you, the best dreams of your one life into drab homogeneity.”
Laurie Penny UNSPEAKABLE THINGS 2014

ST URSULA WITH HER VIRGINS RijksMuseum, Amsterdam

I've been working lately on a new series of works: CAUTIONARY TALES, looking at some of the many perils of being female. In the process I have become more and more aware of the stories that we tell girls about girls and of current issues facing young women.

In many ways it's easy to assume that a girl growing up in the UK today is relatively free from the social constraints. Equal Rights are accepted (at least in theory). We are a liberal and increasingly secular society. Girls have unprecedented freedom to make their own sexual choices. Yet online bullying and judgement of women in the public eye consistently labels them as sluts, as 'unfuckable' and/or threatens them with sexual violence. It is extraordinary that in the 21st Century we are still discussing women in terms of how their bodies are used by others, but that old notion of the woman's body as object has not gone away.
Objectification is a girl's adolescent rite of passage. Mine began in the 1970s. I was a 'slag', an 'ice queen', 'frigid' or 'gagging for it'. All labels assigned according to the judgement of others. I really did think it would be different for my daughter, but some things are slow to change.

Laurie Penny, who experienced acute anorexia as a teenager and survived to write brilliant, excoriating polemics, is my favourite new wave feminist. Penny highlights a prevailing experience of the body as split. Split between the unacceptable body that we have and the body that we ought to have and would have, if we weren't so shamefully ill-disciplined, such poor excuses for womankind. Goodness knows what percentage of national GDP is spent unquestioningly on products that promise without irony to perfect, to transform, to defy age. Each purchase, an investment in the story of our unacceptability while incidents of self harm, eating disorder and body-dismorphia are on the rise.

On a recent trip to Belgium and Holland I saw a lot of medieval virgins, effigies of women without sin. Mary, mother of Jesus and breastfeeding virgin was everywhere. We are centuries from mass cults of virginity but is this impossible-to-achieve notion of untouched womanhood, still lurking in the shadows? Is this the double-bind, that makes us so accepting of our unacceptability? Doubtless, it's more complicated than that, but I am trying to be aware of object-judgement, whether it's out in society or inside my head and to beware of splitting in two, of separating what we are from what should be. It's a political decision. It's not just little girls who need different stories.

Are we post-post modern yet? It's been a while and I'm starting to get bored.

19/2/2015

HERO, LEADER, GOD, Alexander Kosolapov

'Hoover Breakdown' (1979) Bill Woodrow '

..something in my experience was missing. This celebration of commodity, these pastiches of cultural objects, felt both superficial and slight.

Postmodernism and its rejection of the idea of the art work as an original and unique creation was well established by the time I arrived at art school in the 1980s. Games were and are still being played with the notion of artwork as a reproducible object, just like any other consumer durable. In an era of mass production, nothing is unique, so post-modern art parades 'its own superficiality and derivativeness'. * The notion of art as the authentic production of an individual imagination was and remains thoroughly marginalised.

Now I enjoy a bit of of knowing post-modern irony as much as the next woman. I loved encountering Kosolapov's Lenin, Jesus and Mickey Mouse at 'POST POP: EAST MEETS WEST at the Saatchi Gallery last week, appreciating its cultural and political satire, the references to classical and soviet era sculpture...etc. There was pleasure too in the deconstructed components of Bill Woodrow's Hoover, a pleasing elegance in their arrangement, their functionality and their age. Yet, for all this, something in my experience was missing. This celebration of commodity and pastiche's of cultural objects, felt both superficial and slight. Besides a fleeting enjoyment of their craftsmanship and wit, there is little lasting impact. My experience was, in best postmodernist style, disposable.

My problem is that I long for something more. Every time I read a book, watch a film, visit a gallery; I am looking for authentic experience. I want insight; I am even open to be changed. The trouble with clever, contemporary conceptual art (ifice) is that it rarely offers experiences, which mean anything in any depth. It seems to me that this must be because, after decades of rejection of the notion of art made from a unique original perspective, there is a fear of subjective expressions of experience. Imagination is taboo, concept and reason rule.

Postmodernists might well assert that their arch parodies, nihilism and pastiche subvert and shock society. I am not sure how true this is. As Richard Kearney observes,’ groundbreaking' art is often rapidly assimilated into the mainstream. 'Even the most dissident imaginations appear to be swallowed into the ideology of the simulacrum which prevails in our consumer age'.

* Quotations from THE WAKE OF IMAGINATION Richard Kearney 1988