PORTFOLIO > LAUGHING WHILE 2020 -

Laughing While Ascending
Laughing While Ascending
Oil on Linen
50 x 60 cm
2023

Laughing While Ascending proposes a  joyous alternative to lost girls’ whereabouts. It is  the latest in one of Halls’ most renowned series  of paintings, ‘Laughing While,’ 2012 onwards.  The series typically depicts women engaged in  transgressive acts that interrogate encultured  norms around femininity. These women are always  active subjects, often breaking propriety just  by eating messily, causing damage, or laughing  out loud. Halls cites Hélène Cixous’ retelling of  the Chinese general Sun Tse ‘who decapitates a  group of women he is trying to train as soldiers, so  disconcerted, so disgusted is he by their persistent  laughter and refusal to take his orders seriously.  This resonates with me deeply. Acts of political  resistance come in many forms and when I paint  images of women laughing, eating, reclining,  reading, or simply looking, I am always cognisant of  the fact that the most seemingly innocuous actions  can be subversive.’39 
The work’s title contains multiple meanings:  “ascending” is literal; an action that requires physical  
and mental effort. It evokes Ascension – holy figures  carried to heaven by angels – but this trio is far too  full of life to be dead; though maybe their enforced  circumstances have been transcended. There’s  also an implication in “ascending” of that invisible  social ladder. One ascends in importance. Perhaps,  as Halls has suggested, these girls embody the  hopes their parents held when they embarked on  their journeys: that one generation’s struggle will  benefit future generations.40 And also the fears.  Praise for this risk-taking behaviour – seeking to  climb higher still, or sitting, hands thrown up in the  air in magical balancing acts – is too often reserved  for boys. Something Berthe Morisot intuited in her  painting In the apple tree, 1890. 
It has been said that if you’re lost, you should climb  a tree. High up, you’ll have an overview of your  terrain, the better to orient yourself. But this advice  has been debunked. Climb a tree, and apparently  all you’ll see are more treetops. Worse, you may  fall, as few uppermost branches are strong enough  to support an adult’s weight. The girls in Laughing  while Ascending are certainly high, high up. Above  the mist, playing gleefully while the sun rises.  Perhaps they’ve been playing through the night.  Safe from whatever adult chaos and danger await  below.  

Marie-Anne Mancio - Catalogue Essay - Lost Girls

Laughing While Ascending was exhibited in

LOST GIRLS, Flowers Gallery, London 2023