Fashioning the Contemporary Artist: The Spatial Biography of Sue Tompkins

This chapter focuses on the formation of ‘spatialised’ artistic biographies. Where contemporary artists work and live and who they are connected to, personally and professionally, has a huge impact on shaping both their identities as artists and the kind of work they create. While the narratives of artists’ lives and works have historically been recorded through the genre of artists’ monographs, this chapter presents a contemporary critical framework through which to consider the connections between artists’ lives and the works they produce. Here, the artists’ biography is discussed in the context of the field of contemporary art production, where a series of new professions have emerged recently as a result of the increased marketization of art. Therefore this chapter is interested in the fashioning of artists’ identities over time and across geographic locations, as well as through various means of self and institutional representation. Drawing upon a curatorial project I have undertaken with Glasgow based artist Sue Tompkins, I attempt to demarcate the ways in which artists’ biographies trace appropriated symbolic materials and narratives found in the geographical and discursive sites where they live and work. In doing so, I present a reading of Tompkins’ biography across time and place.