Through many different approaches, my work endeavours to deal with issues based around identity, self-image / body image and the conceived image of the other, in particular the roles these play in notions of gendered identity, beauty and desirability. Engendering fluctuations in perception, it often proposes simultaneous possibilities in order to question such notions and to explore their ambiguities.
Utilising the languages of corporeal engagement, the subtle transformation of the body and the mediation of artefacts, the work often proposes an elusive other; one that evades expectations in its fluctuating relation with the viewer. Arousing the possibility of not knowing, the work ultimately questions our need to define, to construct identities for ourselves and our others, and to lay down the terms of our interrelations.
Confronting the body on its own scale, pieces prey upon our fascination with our own image and that which we hold of others, reflecting the relative concurrence, or non-concurrence, of self and mirror image. Their particularities evoke the places and contexts in which we construct ourselves in the eye of the beholder, and fall into gaps between image and identity. References are to the charged arenas where we encounter not only our bodies but our narcissisms and self-hatreds, the places of our privacies and auto-phobias.
Image based work often attempts to effect a transfiguration of the ordinary, a beatification of the commonplace or unappealing. Playing with art’s own traditions and the multiple iconographies of desire, it presents images that are at once seductive, beautiful and repellent. Compounding modes of bodily representation, these images confound divisions; the precious with the mundane, the exalted with the debased, the iconic with the everyday.
In installation works the comparatively private and intimate domestic environment is reconstructed and contained within the scrutinised space of art presentation. The viewer is invited to inhabit another place whose familiarity is unsettled by the objects that cohabit it. Simultaneously tender and disturbing, these are of the order of equipment, issuing both everyday invitation and seductive threat, command and entreaty.
Centred around the body, objects form part of an artistic anthropology whose telling artefacts reflect needs. wishes, desires and aspirations of the absent other that they propose. These ergonomic objects and devices become figurative in terms that extend beyond representation into equivalence, surrogacy, adaptation and extension. Their invitation seeks to implicate the viewer in a directly corporeal, as well as more cerebal sense and they come to fit uncomfortably in the gap between wanting and having, between wishing and being. The encounter exposes a physical, psychological and emotional mis-fit and raises questions around the fetishisation, fragmentation and sexualisation of the body.Nâomi Dines
The idea of being held, fastened, caught whether accidently or on purpose is one that can bring about feelings of surprise, fear and shock. ‘Catcher’ is a trap with a familiar form. Shaped like a trunk it is made from a substance associated with warmth and homliness.
Felt is the stuff that often lines our homes, the unseen material underneath our carpets.It keeps sounds out too. I have always been interested in boxes, whether collecting them, making them, peering inside them or using them in some way. Often the boxes I make have lids and frequently they are firmly shut.
Lois Williams
Shani
Rhys James -Muse of Fire 1994
This
painting was inspired by a double portrait of the British School called the
Mansel Double Portrait. What struck me about this painting was the fettering
of the costumes; the entrapment of the corset, the complicated layers of clothing,
the lacing, the millions of tiny buttons. they could not be worn unless there
were servants to assist the dressing. So in a sense these garments of the
rich, resulted in dependency and helplessness. Would the restriction of physical
freedom restrict actions and thought ? It is a primitive and decorative piece,
Rembrandt would have been ten years old when this was painted, fifty years
later he was to paint the Jewish Bride, four years before his death. They
are both of a couple yet so different in treatment, one formal and stylised,
the other intimate and tender. the Mansel Portrait opened many ideas for me,
the costume, the theatre, the mask, the passing of time, past existing with
the present. The black background became a device to simplify my paintings.
It was often usual to have writing in gold on the painting surface in the
sixteenth and seventeenth Century. A twentieth Century device is to keep the
surface flat, the British School was doing that in the seventeenth century.
Shani Rhys James 1996
‘Close Up’ is a detail shot of two of the musical instrument type cases I have been making for everyday domestic items such as a washbasin, a hoover, a floor polisher and an iron. The cases become anthropomorphic versions of the original objects, exhibiting and exuding a sexuality above and beyond the call of duty. ‘close up’ pushes this designer eroticism to an extreme, and it is unclear exactly what objects or acts are represented in the photograph...
Hadrian Pigott
