An interview with myself

Since I’ve found that I’m not very good at verbalising my intentions and my reasoning, but I’m very good at coming to those conclusions if I write about them, I thought it would be a good exercise for me to breakdown what I’m doing and why in writing, letting the questions form as I go, to hopefully get myself deeper into my ‘whys'. This should also help with giving yous more insight behind my practice.

 

What is your work about?

 

The predominant topic in my work is gender, its mainly autobiographical work looking at my experience within gendered flesh. I aim to question our gendered society, using perceived ‘feminine’ techniques to deconstruct how, not only does my body have an assigned sex, but it has also been assigned a gender and many expectations on top of that. Using over-exaggerated pink and ‘girly’ aesthetics with images of my naked body, I intend to make a playful, yet aggressive, attack on how we view the rules and expectations assigned to our flesh.

 

How does using pink affect your work? Doesn’t using pink add to the stereotype that all women like pink and girly things?

 

Well, this is complicated, I do have a female body, so to combine a ‘female’ body with pinks, people are bound to make the connection that woman=pink, however, I have to question back, why should I avoid using pink since I have a female body? I think me and other non-men understand that we are faced with an unsurmountable number of rules (both written and unwritten) on how we should live our lives, so why should I let the rule that women like pink stop me from using pink. I aim to break down the walls holding myself back, and help others question there’s, and to do that, I cannot be polite, and I have to be aggressive, I need anarchy. Let’s be honest, giving myself rules such as ‘I cant use pink because it’s a girls colour’ is just another way patriarchy can affect me. Anarchy is not defined by giving myself new rules to oppose the ones I’ve been given; it is breaking all the rules down until we are free.

 

But what if somebody makes the connection that woman must equal pink?

 

I don’t want to exclude people from these conversations, but if somebody is looking at my art and just makes the connection of woman=pink, then they are not my target audience. Those who look at my art, and make the connection that somebody could view my work and see the hyper-feminine, with the naked female body and have it reinforce those gender stereotypes, are my target audience. This is because they have identified the issue first hand, they can see the flaws in the woman=pink, which means they can ask themselves why a feminist artist would make those connections. The people who can identify a flaw in such a simple (yet weirdly integral) part of gendered culture, are the ones who can look further into my work, and maybe identify more aspects of it, and really question the rule book assigned to each sex.

 

You say your own naked body in your work, why do you do this?

 

I use my own naked body purely because a lot of my work is autobiographical, and it maps out my experiences which are directly related to my bodies assigned gender, to use another person's nude body would feel disconnected. If you're asking why I paint nudes in general, its for a few reasons, mainly because so many people told me not to, including, but not limited to:

• Some feminists saying that a nude woman’s body in art is objectifying
• Online censorship
• Galleries being full of art of nude women, painted by men.
• My parents
• Honestly also myself, as I didn’t want to objectify myself

 

Many reasons people say a nude AFAB body is inappropriate is because they say its ‘objectifying or ‘sexualising’, but who decided that? And doesn’t saying this perpetuate that woman’s bodies are inherently sexual? Like I said before, making a new rule, does not get rid of the old one, but riding over said rule with a bulldozer and a pack of wild dogs could certainly help.

 

The reasoning honestly isn’t very fancy and intelligent, its just out of spite, as I’m really sick of women’s nude bodies being used to sell products, and make other people money, but god forbid, a woman uses their own body to make money for themselves. This is where so many people draw the line.

 

What is the purpose of the naked form in your work, if its not there to be objectified?

 

It is simply there to insight that line of questioning. I want people to see it, and objectify it. I want my audience to see my work, and question if its explicitness classes as pornography. I want to trap them in these thoughts, so they question their initial judgements of my body, and therefore question what the body is, if its not an object.

 

I will not be giving them answers, just influencing their thoughts so they can question and come to their own conclusions.

 

So, who is this audience we are talking about?

 

Well, I suppose my audience is fairly broad, since everyone exists inside a body, so there may be many things almost everyone can gain from questioning the rules surrounding gender. But my main target audience is those who are less knowledgeable on theories and nuances around gender identity, specifically cisgender people (and mainly cis women), as those are the people who may gain from questioning the rules that have been placed upon them because of their gender. This doesn’t mean in trying to get cisgender people to question their identities, its simply for them to question the rules placed on them because of their gender identity that may not actually serve them. Don’t get me wrong, I think non-cisgender people could also gain from my work in a sense that they may find it relatable or entertaining, but they have likely already questioned gender enough to not gain a huge amount from my work.

 

So, if your audience is cis-gender people (mainly women), how do you cater your work to them?

 

In maybe the shallowest way, I make it pretty. Pretty is palatable, and it is also my form of aggression. What draws in and attracts my audience is also exactly what I’m trying to get them to question.

 

A big part of your work is painting, painting has been going on for thousands of years, so how can it be relevant in the art world today?

 

At the end of the day, nothing in art can truly be original, and just because something is old, and common, doesn’t make it bad. Personally, I enjoy taking a remarkably simple medium as having the limits of the medium breeds creativity for me, since there is only so much, I can do with a 2d surface and paint, I must use my brain to transform this simple set of materials into something new, and representative of my ideas

 

I also think when commenting on fine art as a subject, painting is a great medium to use since its baked into fine art history, and now there’s so many questions on its place within fine art, and if it can even be considered as fine art, or contemporary art.

 

Your recent work shows a lot of insect-like imagery, what is the relevance of this?

 

The insect imagery is based within my own personal fantasy world, the insects being representative of gender transition, and its relative outcomes. Within the natural world, insects go through intense physical transformations compared to most other creatures, many going through stages of shedding their skins, and others transforming from grubs then pupating (turning to sludge inside a hard shell) then appearing as something completely new. Although the transformation in insects is fascinating and beautiful, these creatures are often faced with disgust from people, they are killed, they are pushed out of homes, and they are spoken about as if their lives don’t matter.

 

Within the way I see insects in my work, I would consider the butterfly as the trans man/trans women who passes in day-to-day without question, or as a perfectly androgynous non-binary person, since butterflies tend to be the only insect seen as beautiful, and the only insect where killing them would be frowned upon. Most of the other insects I use in my work, such as spiders, dragonflies, beetles, and centipedes, are feared, not by all, but by a substantial portion of people. This is why is use them a metaphor for transgender people since trans people are also made to be objects of fear and disgust by the media and other influential individuals. And like bugs, those fears do not tend to hold any footing in reality (unless maybe you live in Australia and are surrounded by enormous spiders, but that’s a small fraction of insects, not the whole population, such as in the human world too. At the end of the day, insects will always be more at risk from humans than we are from them).

Many of your works include undertones of disliking certain artistic institutions, why do you do this?

 

A lot of this is mainly directed to art education, just since my experience with art as a subject has been very up and down. Beginning with doing art in secondary school, as GSCEs and A Levels, where we were promised freedom, that we could do whatever we wanted, then to just be told we can’t do anything other than painting, and that we must structure each page of our sketchbooks in the same way as their templates as this seemed to be the winning formula with exam boards. Then moving onto doing my master’s in fine art and finding that I had to bend my work around ethical guidelines, and finding how heavily my art was affected by my intent. Since creating art for university, I’ve had to think about how the other students will view it in the crits, how my tutors will view it, and how galleries/curators may see my work. That’s a lot of people to think about already. We then have the constant reminding of how an audience will view my work, what my work will do for them, and you know, how I’m changing the world with my work etc. Now this, constant reminding of an audience is what has broken down my practice, and I’m yet to decide if it’s a good or bad thing.

 

Prior to starting the course, art was an income source, but not a big one, so it was mostly all created for myself. At this point, I also wasn’t thinking much about my viewers (unless I couldn’t afford rent, then I’d need to consider what sells), and my work was instinctive and felt natural to create. But since starting the course, and picking apart every section of what I do, I feel even more like a machine creating a product, I’ve been trying so hard to be an artist, and just learnt more and more about all the rules and every way I must be to become a proper artist. And honestly, I’m tired. Tired of dreaming of being good enough. So, fuck it, no more farmed art, the university can get fucked, I do not care.