2013 Artist Residencies

So the reason I have started this blog is to keep a documentation of my year long travel, inspiration, art & all things creative.


January this year I packed up my Adelaide studio, left my cosy life of working as a gallery assitant, painter & photographer to take the leap of unknown on a one-way ticket to Europe.

 I have always loved travelling & exploring the world so the opportunity paint & travel seems like a dream come true. 

I am staying in artist residencies where I can live and work with an artist studio & opportunity to exhibit.

My residencies are in Barcelona, Berlin & Sweden to live and work in a community surrounding.  I want to experience living in new cultures, be influenced by new surroundings, meet artists, visit galleries and get busy creating in the studio.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Graduating in 2010 from UniSA's South Australian School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours), my work explores how the female face is objectified within popular advertising. The paintings are an investigation into the painted, fragmented face, questioning the concept of ideal beauty as portrayed in popular imagery. By taking faces used to promote beauty products in glossy fashion magazines and painstakingly reworking them as unique paintings, I symbolically restore them and invest them with individual identity.

I'm fascinated by the way the female face is portrayed in advertising, reduced to a sexualised, superficial object, devoid of human emotion. My work examines the concept of ideal beauty advertisers promote in order to sell their products.
My practise showcases a journey of experimentation with surface, layers and technique. Canvas and ply wood has been used as my support mixed with gel medium to transfer text in a non-readable manner to create pattern and layers. Mixed media such as pen, ink, acrylic and spray enamel allow accidental mark making combined with traditional oil painting. More recently I have been finishing my paintings with resin which creates a thick varnish creating a glossy, smooth finish.
An unreal and unattainable beauty is presented as the norm through images and persuasive text in women's magazines. My works result as a mere superficial representation of an ideal female beauty that reflects the beauty and fashion industry. The viewer is asked to consider how these faces function when they are taken out of the environment of mass-production and transferred into a fine art context?

 

View my artist CV here

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