I'll Be Your Mirror

'I'll Be Your Mirror' was a one-person exhibition at Transition Gallery, London, with catalogue (Transition Editions 3 ISBN: 0954895428 ), and comprising of eight paintings and an animated drawing, not previously exhibited. All of the pieces in the exhibition were made during my seven-month residency at the Women’s Library, London. Using the library’s archive, I sourced imagery from women’s magazines from the 1950s to date that helped inform the visual construction of the narrative paintings. These paintings mirror the tableaux-like device of open-ended narrative imagery in contemporary media, such as advertisements for film and TV programmes, but which aim to describe feminist narratives that do not often get represented in popular imagery aimed at women.
The paintings propose narrative scenarios which refer to historical and contemporary positions within feminism. For example, the painting 'Rebel, Rebel' refers to the struggles inherent in the gap between third wave feminism’s adoption of media imagery ('Sex and the City', 'Desperate Housewives') and hard-line second wave rejection of media representation.
The paintings are to be understood within the context of contemporary narrative painting, looking at the Leipzig schule painters (e.g. Neo Rauch, Tilo Baumgartel, Matthias Wiescher) in particular as examples of this field. My work uses similar language but aims to identify female narratives from a British perspective.
The residency at the Women’s Library was the first example of an artist directly working from the archive, and during the residency I exhibited 'Smooth Operators and Material Girls’ a group of cut-out figure paintings, installed throughout the building, which corresponded to the library’s simultaneous exhibition 'Women in Thatcher’s Britain'.