Aberdeen Art Gallery micro-commission
-Barbara Hepworth
Becoming, 110x100cm, oil on canvas, 2021
The painting Becoming is about an
experience of colour and form in the first instance. It also speaks to the
ideas which have influenced its realization, namely an investigation into
historical depictions of women’s work and the contemporary female aesthetic
within the Aberdeen Art Gallery collections. It also has to do with the artists
individual experience of exploring feminism alongside the unpredictable nature
of artistic practice.
This painting responds to two artworks in
particular, Tracy Emin’s prominent neon heart For You and
Barbara Hepworth’s Meditation. Emin’s heart expresses a feminine
aesthetic through its colours and subtle message. The ‘x’ at the end of the
poem is reminiscent of a kiss from a text message. The kiss as a gesture of
love and caregiving is central to the experience of woman, and in Becoming the
symbol also embodies this idea. Added to this is the element of joyful
movement. The circular form, inspired by Hepworth’s Meditation,
also developed from a desire to represent the impression of woman and balance.
These ideas of being woman include strength implied through a solid foundation
of carved stone or the thickly painted surface, delicate sensitive edges and
the beauty of an irregular rounded form that can envelop or extend care for
those around her. ‘X’ is the opposite of ‘O’, the first being strong and
delicately decisive while the second softly encompassing, and a palette of
complementary colours is used in order to amplify this harmonious
dissonance. They can also represent the biological possibilities that
originate from the ‘x’ chromosome or the potential merging of the two symbols
to make the female gender sign. Ultimately, the painting speaks to the prospect
of both celebrating woman and reconciling differences which is what lies at the
heart of feminism.
The title was also inspired by philosophers Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-woman’ as a space of potential for
development and change. Becoming takes on this potential by
exploring the multifaceted aspects of woman in her sensuality, strength and
harmonious human nature. It looks at differences in abstract form and colour in
order to strive towards a balance.
Summary of Research:
I am honoured to have been granted a commission
from the Aberdeen Art Gallery. I started out with the intention of making a
painting in response to the theme of women’s work and the female aesthetic. I
wanted my process to lead the way so I began by sketching from the collection
in order to see what I would respond to intuitively. I was initially drawn to
Robert McGregor’s Mussel Gatherer’s and George Hitchcock’s Maternité because
they are historical representations of care and women’s work. Similarly Herald
Knight’s The Embroideress and the many Sampler examples in the collection
looks at women’s work in the home and explore the ideas important to the
19th-century woman: beauty, poetry, religion, truth. By sketching the
women in these historical paintings there developed a sense of identification
or empathy for their situations and stories. This brought up the question
of what the important values for women are today and if they could be
symbolically represented through an object. Some of the pressing ideas I found
essential to women and feminism included equality in education and
work, legal rights and in particular reproduction rights and
menstrual dignity. Images of abstracted menstrual pads or fire blood-red stains
on canvas came to mind, but it did not sit well with me as a representation for
contemporary woman, because this may no longer be the unifying aspect of
womanhood as it would exclude some of the LGBTQ+ community. Another idea that
struck me as possibly the most essential and current aspect for women today is
that of communication because it is through open access to information and free
speech that women can support each other in striving against inequities. The
cell phone would be the image of choice to symbolize communication, but this could not be limited to women alone.
My research also explored the issues women are
facing now during the Covid-19 pandemic. The most prominent one was that of
unemployment or overwork due to balancing multiple roles of work and
caregiving. This brought to light the essential idea of care. In response to
this, I began to draw hands as a recognizable symbol of caregiving and women’s
manual work. Another idea I explored was putting masks on the paintings in the
collection. This was significant in that it related to the idea that female
voices have long been silenced and that we are all now having an experience of that. The feminist movement's work is to
liberate those voices. Overall, the research aspect to this project brought up
lots of ideas and many questions, such as what a female aesthetic is, why the
roles of women continue to be gender-biased and how to represent contemporary
ideas through abstract painting.
Women are often the ones holding the family and
their work-life together and striving towards a balance between the two.
Similarly, feminism is about finding a balance between men and woman, noting
differences but striving towards equality. I arrived at the
two final images in Becoming through an exploration into
Wilhelmina Barns-Grahm’s Protest, which depicts a devolvement
of order. I began to consider how to depict feminism and the idea
of woman symbolically, but I was reticent to represent the fight for feminism,
preferring to consider forms representing balance or of 'coming together,'
universal forms that signify harmony, presence, and can be extended to imply
equality. The forms I discovered were predominantly sculptural such as the
Neolithic stone-carved balls in the Aberdeen Art Gallery collection, Hepworth’s
form work (Oval Form, Requiem and Mediation) ceramic vases which
represented the sensual but imperfect beauty of the female form (Kaneko’s Tall
Tin-Covered Vase & Susan Disley’s Stoneware Vessel) as
well as abstract forms implying movement such as contemporary artist Marete
Rasmussen’s Red Form.
Process & Reflections:
I felt very comfortable sketching initially in
pastels to get my ideas out as well as working with watercolour, but once I
started experimenting with acrylic paints, a new material for me, I became
easily frustrated. It was good to experiment and try different themes, but it
did take some time to renew my practice in oil paint. I realized that my
painting process has quite a lot to do with failure and starting again. I see
that I often make mistakes in order to find a way out of them. I paint in layers,
erasing or etching into the canvas or adding sheens or texture, and the process
becomes about responding to what is at hand, dealing with the past and trying
to create a new future plane which is ideally harmonious.
This project helped me to emerge from a creative
covid slump I had not previously thought to have fallen into. It rejuvenated my
practice by giving me a new theme to research. It provided funds for new
materials and books which I will continue to find inspiration from, in
particular, Barbara Hepworth’s Writings and Conversations and
Hannah Stark's Feminist Theory After Deleuze. I found it immensely
enjoyable to sketch freely from the collection that even towards the end of the
project I fit in a couple of sketches just to stay connected to the sort of
observation that drawing allows. I look forward to being able to visit the
Gallery once it re-opens in order to sketch from the collection in person
again.
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