Research and Critical Reflection
Autotheory and Feminism in Practice – A Critical Reflection
Dearest gentle reader,
I hope you enjoy an exploration and investigation into the representation of women who are alive and from the archive. In collaboration with humour, sound and erotic poetry my critical reflection explores representation and is a practice informed by autotheory and feminist figureheads.
My extensive, reflective, theoretical chapters include:
On Humour
On Process
On Women and Representation
On Fandom
On The Archive
On Voice
On Humour
‘Be More Bonobo’: a phrase I hadn’t heard before venturing into the feminist library, created by their recent artist in residence, Rachael House. House creates objects, events, performance, drawings and zines with a focus on feminist and queer politics. Her work explores resistance politics and histories/herstories.
During House’s residency at the library, she created her ‘Be More Bonobo’ series, representing ‘the peaceful, female led, behaviourally bisexual society of the endangered bonobo great apes together with The Feminist Library badge archive.’ (The Feminist Library, 2023) The work is comical and playful, combining radical feminist propaganda with sexual imagery of Bonobos. One of House’s tools for creation is her use of humour. An example is her painting ‘I just saw two sparrows going at it. Cheered me right up.’ When considering the use of humour within my own practice I allowed the phrase ‘Be more Bonobo’ to rattle around in my head and combine with my method and material lessons. To me, the language used in describing different material process had sexual connotations.
By considering this erotic language, with added humour, I created my pornographic process poems with accompanying videos and soundscapes. They encompass female desire, embodying the experience of material and opening a dialogue for discomfort when intruding on someone’s private intimate thoughts. These sound work poems are reminiscent of the dark humour and inimically honest ‘Fleabag’ by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; where Waller-Bridge breaks the fourth wall to describe her most intimate and perverse thoughts with the audience (Stewart. J, 2021). Like Fleabag, my poems are navigating the space between public and personal, using auto-theory as a ‘method of using the body’s experience to develop knowledge’. (Fournier. L, 2018, P25) Lauren Fournier explains how autotheory describes contemporary works ‘that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective and embodied modes with discourses of philosophy and theory in ways that transgress genre conventions and disciplinary boundaries.’ (Fournier. L, 2018, P7)
On Process
My Pornographic Process Poems highlight my desire for embodying and consuming process. These poems also demonstrate and explore theory put forward by Amia Srinivansan, in ‘The Right to Sex’, on not sleeping with your students: ‘Do I want to be like him, or to have him?’ (Srinivasan. A, 2022, P113) Srinivansan explores complex power structures when students of consensual age engage in sexual relationships with their teachers/lecturers. Srinivansan explores whether these relationships have partly occurred because of a student's infatuation with their teacher’s knowledge instead of physicality. My poems explore this muddy field associated with the desire to learn and the sexual ethics of learning. (Srinivasan. A, 2022, P136)
The history of Egg Tempera is relevant to my conceptual thinking as the material was used to paint icons during the early Christian era, including the Madonna. (Cullins. R, 1999). The paintings would be handled, kissed and transported around. This historical context raises questions of women’s bodily autonomy and consent though a 21st century lens.
The adoration given to these paintings is not dissimilar to that of celebrities now with fandoms. By using Egg Tempera, I am placing the woman I depict on a pedestal, not dissimilar to religious icons. Egg Tempera allows you to slowly apply thin transparent layers on top of each other resulting in luminosity reminiscent of Watercolor. This labour intense creation also supports the notion that the women I represent are created though a labour of love.
Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Book, or the Madonna del Libro,
c. 1480-1481, EGG Tempera on panel
I created the work in a small scale, a considered choice, in keeping with the thinking of Marcel Duchamp and his ‘La Boîte-en-Valise’ (Box in a Suitcase) and Lucy Lippard’s proposed exhibition in a suitcase, creating a traveling exhibition.
I enjoy the ease of movement, the transportability; my works are similar in scale to dimensions of a book. I can build and reconstruct, creating larger compositions of expansive narratives like Lego. The size also changes the viewer’s interaction with the work: you move in close, to inspect the detail, you are so close, your breath is on their body.
On women and Representation
Combining fragmentations of women: I reconfigure them. “In writing themselves, women ‘have attempted to render noisy and audible all that had been silenced in phallocentric discourse.’” (Minh–ha. T, 2009, P37)
When considering who I paint, I am mindful of appropriation, considering the ethical implications when using the image or voice of another. (The MIT Press, 2023) In depicting women I know, I gain full consent to use their image. When exploring women from history, or from the archive, I can reimagine and re-create their lives, playing with representation, colour, pattern, and narrative. It becomes a form of subjective embodiment. I am integrating my autobiographical experience with social criticism: using feminist theory to underpin and critically evaluate. By using autotheory as a method of working I can ‘integrate the personal and the conceptual, the theoretical and the autobiographical, the creative and the critical.’ (Fournier. L, 2022, P7)
The women I paint are as much their own women as they are a combination and reimagining of my version of them and my critical engagement with feminist and autotheory.
Autotheory is necessary as it provides a dialogue for radical self-reflection: using the body as a tool for representing an embodied experience. Artists can navigate and name their practice, N Millers explains ‘personal is also theoretical: the personal is part of theory material.’ (Fournier. L, 2022, P12)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has approached the ethics of using the Black body within her paintings. By using varied sources to create her figures in combination with poetic titling the viewer re-imagines spaces of leisure for the Black body. By anonymising her figures, Yiadom-Boakye creates space, for political conversations around race and representation to occur while respectfully depicting her figures. Yiadom- Boakye is able to manipulate and re-invent race, she explained that her figures are ‘black because… I’m not white. People are often tempted to politicize the fact I paint black figures, and this is an essential part of the work’ (Rideal, L. and Soriano, Kathleen, 2018, P147).
On Fandom
Fandoms can be considered a method of engagement, as to be a fan ‘often indicates an over attachment, and excessive engagement’ (Grant. C, 2022, P21). For me, excessive engagement can be seen through my obsessive method of representing a person, drawing and painting the same person repeatedly; paired with my over attachment to feminist discourse. Resulting in a fandom seen through the portraits of women close to me: a declaration of admiration.
Jerkins writes ‘Being a Fan of feminism does not replace being a feminist but it does articulate a particular relationship to histories of feminism (Grant. C, 2022, P27), and I am a fan of feminism.
Elizabeth Peyton is an artist that has navigated this area of fandom. Through painting ‘from her own life and beyond’ (Phaidon, 2022, P236) Peyton’s practice successfully explores the function of the fan, navigating the wider concerns with the nature of fandom in relation to ideas surrounding celebrity culture. (Honigman. A)
Thinking about archive and fandom, led me to consider how I play more freely with representation, specific ideas around feminism and narrative. Moving beyond women’s exclusion from the arts and thinking about wider historical contexts. For example, my paintings of Eleanor Rathbone and Claudia Jones. I discovered these women though the book ‘Bloody Brilliant Women’ by Cathy Newman.
‘Bloody Brilliant Women’ is a homage to some of the women left out of the history books. Newman’s combination of historical archives and her comical truthful writing style brings these women back to life.
There is a clear desire in the book to celebrate these women from the past, while highlighting some of the problematic issues or views the women held, which is often a critique laid against feminist histories. When describing Bell, for example, Newman first outlines all of her achievements and extraordinary accomplishments, before suggesting ‘Her ferocious dislike of the women’s suffrage movement is hard to understand today.’ (Newman. C, 2019, P115). This description and acknowledgement of a women’s faults as well as their successes, is significant as it leans itself to the honest mode of representation I am interested in.
On The Archive
Kaye Doanachie uses figurative images of ‘radical women’ (Maureen Paley Gallery, 2018) in her mystical, utopian paintings of imagined women using literary references and archival materials. Donachie’s women are situated in a nostalgic colour pallet, becoming ‘dream like portraits of women inspired by real figures.’ (Apollo, 2021) A benefit of Donachie’s use of cropping, and zoomed frames, which focus on face and hands, results in an imitate exchange with viewer and viewed. This style of composition is one I frequently employ within my representations of women.
Using Doanachie and House as prompts I explored archival and historical imagery, opening up communication about wider issues within feminism without exploiting new imagery. Instead, my depictions are based on homage and admiration. A successful example is my painting of Claudia Jones: ‘Flourish and fall, you leave us impoverished, and out of the conversation’.The title of this painting is a combination of her language, mixed with my imagination.
‘Flourish and fall, you leave us impoverished, and out of the conversation.’, Watercolour and coloured pencil on board, 2023
Jones floats in a temporal space, in comparison to the heavier grounded depictions of the women I know represented in Egg Tempera. In ‘Women Native Other’, Minh-ha describes how women’s creation must be separate from men’s abstraction, saying ‘Women’s creation far from being like man’s must be exactly like her creation of children, that is it must be by her own milk.’ (Minh –ha. T, 2009, P37) This idea resonated with me for my depicted of Jones as it allowed me to explore the space between fact and fiction, imagined and re-imagined.
I hope to emulate Minh-ha’s ideas with my method of representing qualities about each woman such as their individual characteristics, as demonstrated through their tattoos and clothing, ‘with its decorative plenitude at the same time it convinces the mind of the accuracy of its representation’ (Nochlin. L, 2020, P221). My method of delicate and laboured representation pays homage to these women.
The Early Naughties, Charley. Egg Tempera, 10x1cm , 2023
On Voice
At the feminist library I was drawn to Heresies #7 Women Working Together Vol. 2 No. 3 spring 1979, drawn to an article called ‘Portrait of an office’, Pages 28-34 written by Margaret Wiley: a combination of text and image, the article moves through the workers in an office space, explores power structures and the frustrating dynamics of co-workers.
Although this article is working on the micro, it is reflective of the patriarchal macro style. Wiley provides the reader with a brutally honest description of everyone in her office; it is unknown if these depictions are based on reality or are fictionalized. It resonates: ‘Nobody in the office liked her. She was a climber, and everyone resented the way she told her friends’ (Wiley. M, 1979, P29). This article taps into method of depiction supported by autotheory and the notion that the personal is political.
By using an everyday situation to critically evaluate wider contextual issues, Lauren Fournier argues “the history of feminism is, in a sense, a history of auto-theory,” (Fournier. L, 2022, P8). A benefit of this writing style, that engages in auto-theory, can be seen in Adam Kay’s ‘The Diaries of a Junior Doctor’. He is able to reshape content, often dark and personal, into something comically playful, “I’m as big a fan of recycling as the next man, but if you turn a used condom inside out and put it back on for round two, it’s probably not going to be that effective.” (Kay, 2017) I relate to and emulate this style within my own writing and audio works; highlighting these examples shows how I intend navigate my own voice and the voice of others moving forward.
My sound interview pieces re-appropriated questions from ‘Talking to women’ by Nell Dunn, allowing me to draw out the personal honest truth: reflective of Wiley and Kay’s writing style. The women I interview can be seen as real, problematic and courageous. They have their own voice but I edit and manipulate, exploring the duality of truth and the mask at the same time.
Similarly, when I paint, I keep elements of their personal attributes of the person I represent.
For you, my dearest gentle reader I conclude with a poem.
Voices and Breath,
Touching of lips,
Holding your tongue,
Portraits of women,
I pick at my skin,
A personal touch,
Talk at me,
Described processes.
Bibliography
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