Personal Vision Of Womanhood

CONTEXT, MODERN AND HISTORICAL:

The area I am exploring is influenced by Feminism. My current research interest lies in the context of feminist consciousness.

Freedman (2002 in Gilmore, 2004) offers one of the most useful definitions of feminism: "Feminism is a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies".

I am not conflating biological sex with gender however there is quite clear relationship with the two. It is beyond the scope of this research to explore that.

Marlene Le Gates, a historian of early modern Europe, shows how feminism is shaped by specific historical contexts, describing the individual and collective struggles for better education and employment opportunities, legal rights, and the reform of family life and sexual standards. This provides a deep overview of challenges and challengers to gender norms within the past twenty centuries. Therefore, she divides the history of feminism into three stages: "first, an early stage in which women rebelled against gender norms on an individual level (early Christianity, the Middle ages) second, a stage in which institutions were seen as human made and not as divine in which the emergence of feminist consciousness became possible (Renaissance, Reformation) and third, a stage of the emergence of feminist movements in the eighteenth century."(Le Gates, 2001 in Roth, 2003)

She argues that feminism, as a social movement was only possible in the third stage with the rise of nation-states and democracies. Women played an important role in the salons of the Enlightenment and participated in the French and American Revolutions. Nonetheless, they were still denied political rights and were excluded from the emerging public sphere. "Feminism was one of many sources of reformers and radicals, and women became active in a number of religious, political, and social movements."(Roth, 2003) I have found it useful to briefly describe feminism as this work is influenced by feminist consciousness. In this image, I am approaching the theme of motherhood and career. Motherhood and career have been themes central to feminist debate, at least in modern first-world nations. (see Freedman E., 2002).

I am going to develop the topic of motherhood and career through my personal experience. For this purpose I am especially interested in further investigating artists that have explored their own experiences in their artistic practice.

Frida Kahlo

I have done some research into Frida Kahlo`s work and I share with her the idea of communicating feelings and our through symbols. I like the idea of investigating my own thoughts and feelings and in order to find a way of expressing them in an implicit way.

The artist Frida Kahlo, who has addressed issues of identity and self-dialog in her work, has influenced my creative process and visual aesthetic. Looking to Frida Kahlo`s work makes me feel as I am in a visual journey through her feelings. Her paintings formed a visual diary. As in a diary or a journal Frida expresses her inward dialog that was, all too often, a scream of pain. Her paintings gave shape to memories, to landscapes of the imagination, to scenes glimpsed and faces studied. Her paintings are rich in symbolic palettes, kept madness (yellow) and the claustrophobic prison of plaster and steel corsets at arm`s length. Her personal vocabulary of iconic imagery reveals clues as to how she devoured life, loved, hated, and perceived beauty. Her paintings, seasoned with words and diary pages and recollections of her contemporaries, reward us with a life lived at a fractured gallop, ended - possibly - at her own will, and left behind a courageous collective self portrait. Her stoic gazes from photos and her paintings translucently concealed the many psychological hurts and slight she had endured. (Souter, 2010)

In this image, The love embrace of the universe, Frida Kahlo uses the body of a woman to represent the universe, the distinction between a human body and a universal body is made clear through the use of vegetation. Frida makes rich use of symbols and allegories in her work. I like this approach and want to convey it to my practice.

Tracey Emin

Another artist that I have done some research into is Tracey Emin. "Tracey Emin`s work is recognised for its inclusion of personal details, which the general public has thought of as anecdotes from the artist`s private life. While Emin has always been inspired by expressionist painters Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, her personal style takes a feminist approach that is quite direct in presenting her provocative choice of subject matter while also subtle in Emin`s willingness to include an underlying personal intimacy. Emin`s practice features small acrylics, neon, film, and sculpture." (royalacademy.org.uk, 2007).

In Emin`s article `My head and face became a flash, my body strangely sexy` ("Emin," 2009), the language she adopts is intimate and it made me almost feel that I was reading a page of her diary. She addresses topics related to self-esteem, achievement, ageing and motherhood. Whether her article touches me for its sensibility and I feel somehow voiced by her, I do not really think I would use an image of myself naked as she did to talk about those topics.

While I am conscious of the importance of Emin as an artist and I feel that her work voices some of my own opinions on topics such as femininity or motherhood, I think that her language is too explicit. I have mixed feelings about her work. If, on the one hand, I admire her courage to openly discuss private matters, thereby giving voice to many other people, including me, I also feel that her explicit language is something that can be intimidating I would feel vulnerable and intimidated by whoever would see my work if I ever used this form of artistic expression Nonetheless, I feel it was important to further investigate her work as it clarified the direction of artistic language that I want to undertake.