LAUGHING WHILE 2020 -
LAUGHING WHILE BRAVING
"But for me it was nothing, just a desire to laugh. A need to laugh in the face of an oncoming disaster. Like Laughing at an erupting volcano" Chantal Akerman - My Mother Laughs
My work considers how self- surveillance circumscribes the repertoire of legitimate actions available to women and subverts these internalised rules of conduct. Frequently employing a wry humour and potent glamour to foreground my unsettling narratives, my paintings act as an antidote to passive spectatorship with their febrile interplay of queerness, class, gender, performance, freedom and refusal. I see the women I depict as erotic agents of change. They laugh while escaping catastrophic yet essential scenarios of their own making.
I describe the subjects for my paintings of laughing women not as passive sitters but as collaborators: this methodology of joint endeavour is a vital aspect of my working process. For Laughing While Braving I collaborated with the photographer Henri T and costume and theatre designer Shanti Freed and was inspired to create this work by their love.
Laughing While Braving was exhibited in
FACE TO FACE - A CELEBRATION OF PORTRAITURE, Marlborough Gallery, London 2023