Artist Research

Artist Research:

Sarah Maple:

Sarah Maple is an award-winning visual artist known for her bold, brave, mischievous, and occasionally controversial artworks that challenge notions of identity, religion, and the status quo. Much of Maple's inspiration originates from her mixed religious and cultural upbringing.

Maple harnesses her frustration, dismay, and disappointment in prevailing attitudes into mature and thought- provoking work that challenges ideas around identity, religion, race, the artworld, feminism and freedom of expression. Often using herself as a conduit to challenge stereotypes and normative behaviour, Maple is adept at confronting complex issues that we are all thinking about with wit, irony, and a startling honesty

‘Anti Rape Cloak’—created as part of ‘The Sisters of Perpetual Resistance’ residency, for which she was asked to create an ‘object of nuisance’. She then took the cloak on her travels and photographed herself wearing it in various locations and situations.

‘If I loved you, it was because of your hair, I don’t love you anymore.’—indicating that its all about the looks of a person that makes people fall for someone when without them they are simply unlovable which isn’t the case, trying to normalize that there is more to someone than just there looks.

‘Menstruate with pride.’—highlighting the fact that having a period is a natural occurrence in the female body and that we as women shouldn’t be a shame of it and hide our menstrual cycle.

‘Women are no longer viewed as objects.’—I believe this to be a humorous play on words as in fact many women are still seen and treated like objects into days society and this piece is simply pointing out that that view has not changed by taunting that is has.

Niki De Saint Phalle:

Saint Phalle’s career had two chief phases: feminist rage, expressed by way of .22 rifles fired at plaster sculptures inside which she had secreted bags of liquid paint, and feminist celebration of womanhood, through sculptures of female bodies, often immense, in fibreglass and polyester resin. The shooting period lasted from 1961 until about 1963. The bodies consumed the rest of her life.

All her life, the artist had campaigned against social injustices, racial segregation, women’s lack of rights, and against the stigmatization of people with AIDS. Her art was an ode to female strength, both sensual and empowering. It criticized conservative values and celebrated the full, brilliant, versatile spectrum of human beings.

Learning forms a young age that men had power, Niki De Saint Phalle wanted that for herself, she wanted the outside world to belong to her therefore, she became a self-taught artist who rebelled against ruling patriarchal structures taking inspirations from her traumatic life and her own knowledge of the world she lived in.

Shooting Picture is a relief work by the artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The surface of the work is rough and textured, featuring a white background and multiple streams of differently coloured paint including purple, yellow, blue, red, and black. Each of the colours appears to have dripped down the canvas from a hole, which exposes a dark surface beneath the white. Saint Phalle made this work by shooting with a gun at bags of paint that were placed on the canvas. Before the shooting began, the surface was covered with white plaster and pigment to resemble a blank canvas. As the shooting commenced, the bags would be punctured, and the coloured paints released to flow and splash.

Saint Phalle recognised the novelty and potential parody of her shooting performance, particularly in gendered terms. Having previously worked as a fashion model and trained in theatre, Saint Phalle performed her role as an artist, sometimes dressing in a clean, white overall cinched at the waist with black boots and at other times in overtly femme-fatale costume such as a sleek red dress parodying different aspects of gendered and creative identities. In this way her work has been understood in relation to feminism, although the artist distanced herself from the organised Women’s Liberation Movement.

In the mid-1960s Saint Phalle worked on the Tires less frequently and instead began making a new series titled the Nanas, the title of which draws on the slang word for woman in French. These figurative sculptures depict large, curvaceous women decorated with bright colours and motifs, often with limbs raised as if during a joyous dance or a ferocious rage.

Francesca Woodman:

Francesca Woodman is best known for photographing herself. But her pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. She is often nude or semi-nude and usually seen half hidden or obscured – sometimes by furniture, sometimes by slow exposures that blur her figure into a ghostly presence. These beautiful and yet unsettling images seem fleeting but also suggest a sense of timelessness. The images convey an underlying sense of human fragility. This fragility is exaggerated by the fact that the photographs are printed on a very small scale – they seem personal and intimate.

Her importance as an innovator is significant, particularly in the context of the 1970s when the status of photography was still regarded as less important than painting and sculpture. She led the way for later American artists who used photography to explore themes relating to identity such as Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.

Francesca Woodman’s entire body of work was produced as a young person and created over just eight short years. Her photographs explore many themes that affect young people such as relationships, sexuality, questions of self, body image, alienation, isolation and confusion or ambiguity about personal identity.

Most people are conscious of how they present themselves and how they would like others to see them. Francesca was no different. Although photographs are often seen as showing the truth, Francesca’s pictures are thoughtfully staged. She created an imagined reality through her use of locations, lighting, clothing, props, and her own body.

Woodman’s photographs are mostly very small in scale. This encourages us to look at them closely and deeply to work out what we are seeing and decipher their messages. When we find Francesca, she often appears naked or partially clothed, disguised or abstracted by photographic effects such as blurring caused by slow shutter speeds.

Drawing on Surrealist and Gothic literature, Woodman’s work is also seen as feminist. Critic Rosalind Krauss identified feminist elements in her work, like the way she shields herself from the male gaze and presents her naked body as a sort of animal carcass.

Frida Kahlo:

Frida Kahlo was a woman who dared to defy the circumstances of her unfortunate life. Her works of art may have showcased great talent, but it was her tenacity in the face of hardship and a gender-biased society that have become valuable inspiration for many. Today, Kahlo is remembered for being a woman who broke all social conventions. Her defiance against needing to fit in is nothing less than admirable – both back then and even now. Even Madonna – the great feminist of our time – has said that she admires Kahlo. The American singer-songwriter’s Bedtime Story video has lots of imagery inspired by the surrealist movement and is filled with references to the works of Kahlo.

Despite the harsh gender inequality of the 1900s, Kahlo was honest about being a woman. And that is what that puts her, even now, at the forefront of being a feminist. Never once did she hide, cower, or expect to be shielded from the harsh realities of her life. Kahlo was also open about her sexuality. She was never ashamed to admit that she was a bisexual, nor did she ever feel the need to apologise for her choice of bed partners. One of her notable affairs was with American-born French entertainer Josephine Baker.

She refused to alter her features. These included her mono-brow and faint moustache, which were labelled as inappropriately “masculine”. She even exaggerated them more in her self-portraits. Nevertheless, Kahlo was not afraid to be herself – a woman. She embraced colours, wearing bright and bold dresses, as well as not thinking twice about adorning herself with flowers and ribbons.

Kahlo’s works have been described as surrealism at its finest. She experimented with many varied styles and motifs – often shocking the art world with paintings filled with sexual references. Her subject matters were symbolic. The themes she focused on proved to be deeply personal in nature too. Her heritage for instance, or her long struggles with childlessness and femininity. Her paintings touched on female issues such as abortion, miscarriage, birth, breastfeeding and much more. These were things considered to be strictly taboo and never spoken of at all in public back then. Her heart wrenchingly raw and deeply personal self-portraits are retrospectively seen as feminist as the artist led the way for women to present their bodies, their pain and their frustrations as art.

Georgia O’Keeffe:

Recognized as the “Mother of American modernism”, and the foremother of feminist art movement, Georgia O’Keeffe was an American modernist artist. Primarily known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. She littered her work with references to the female form. For example, her flower paintings became famous for their curves, folds, interiors, layers, and darkness’s- which O’Keeffe painted to allude to female genitalia. She stood up for female artists in the early 20th century paving the way for feminist artists of the 1960s and 70s.

In the flower paintings for which O’Keeffe became most famous the curves, folds, interiors, layers, darkness cannot fail to bring to mind female genitalia. Half a century after Rosenfeld 1970s feminist critics and painters, including most notably Judy Chicago, took up O’Keeffe as their own. As Griselda Pollock says in her excellent catalogue essay, ‘the [hitherto] absence of any analogical evocation of the female body as a site of active pleasure or autonomous sexuality’ was regarded as a narcissistic blow to feminists. Pornography which was becoming more widely available presented female sexuality as ‘anticipatory and passively receptive to masculine desire’ and no wonder that O’Keeffe’s paintings seemed to so many to be a rare, distinctive, and erotic counterpoint to such a prevailing view.

Jenny Saville:

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.

Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the centre of the history of art. Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Seville is linked to the great European pictorial tradition in constant comparison with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.
Her work also outlines a strong correlation with the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular with some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces.