Gallery 4 - Beauty And Blemish

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- Circe
- Gary Embelished
- Lana With Joy
- Liberty
- Ravishing
- Rock Scarred

Subverting Beauty

Western culture is dogged by its inability to transcend the allure of the material world. For us, all that glitters is gold - beautiful people are fascinating and good - and we too can be all of the above if only we could reshape our bodies.

I wanted Blemish to challenge all of this on two levels, firstly with the images themselves and secondly using the piercings to disrupt the lie of illusionism.

The inspiration began with the Victorians. On the one hand the Pre-Raphaelites created the enduring stereotypes of fey beauty while on the other hand doctors and sideshows were obsessively documenting all the physical abnormalitiesand distortions that nature can jprovide. The Elephant Man is simply the best known of these.

Leonardo Da Vinci showed these same dual fascinations. Publicly, he created Mona Lisa and Madonna of the Rocks while privately his diaries were full of grotesques and anatomical drawings, function and dysfunction. So what, I wondered, would happen if I could put both sides of this coin uppermost at the same time?

Doing things to the canvas seemed a logical next step. I love assemblage and the manipulation of objects. The painting subverts stereotypes so why not disrupt the actual physical support for these images? Just as the image is disrupting the dualities - beauty/ugliness, normal/abnormal, health/disease - so the piercing disrupts the physical lie of the image: it's just flat paint. Am I piercing the faces, the image or the canvas? For me it was the canvas but the possibilities for confusion are intriguing. Having decided on this I didn't intend the piercing to be an act of aggression or destruction on the painting. No, the disruption of the surface was another opportunity to address beauty and decoration, and even to restate the modernist emphasis of surface pattern.

Strangely, it has been a healthy process to cut and pierce something that I have laboured over so much - it attacks the preciousness and reminds me it is just paint after all.

Note: all works are under bevelled glass in timber boxes lined with Belgian linen.

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