Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity

08/10/19

Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity

Laura Jean Healey is an award-winning film-maker who uses the medium of film to explore the nature of the cinematic experience. Her particular focus is on the role and objectification of the female form on the screen. Her holographic film installation, The Siren (2012), shot underwater in slow-motion, won the Passion For Freedom Gold Film Award in 2014. She is currently working on a new project, The (Un)Holy Trinity, exploring the representation of three legendary ‘unnatural’ women: Lilith, Eve and Salome.

Can you summarise the concept behind your forthcoming work – a triptych of digital films, portraying Lilith, Eve and Salome, entitled The (Un)Holy Trinity? What do these three women represent, both in existing legend, and for you? 

Throughout history, these three women – taken directly from the Bible (Eve and Salome), or inspired by the inconstancies found within the book (Lilith) – have been vilified for their ‘unwomanly’ actions and used to serve as a warning as to how destructive female sexuality can be if left unchecked. 

According to Jewish law, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was made in the same manner as him and considered herself his equal. When he wanted her to lie beneath him, she refused to submit, enraging both Adam and God. In her frustration, she fled from paradise, and, in so doing, became a succubus (temptress of innocent men), breeder of evil spirits, and child-murdering monster of the night.

  

Eve, unlike Lilith, was not made as an equal to Adam. Even though both she and Adam ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, bringing about the Fall of Man, it was Eve alone who bore the ultimate responsibility and was punished with the pain of childbirth and being subjected to her husband’s will.

Salome was a young virgin, who danced for her uncle/step-father, in order to win the head of John the Baptist. In her desperation to possess him, she exerted a more dominant, ‘masculine’ sexuality and was punished for this ‘monstrous’ nature. 

I have always been fascinated by these women’s stories. It is these cautionary tales of the ‘unnatural woman’ that have been used to justify holding back women throughout history. Even today, women are often still inherently judged by these unfair and contradictory standards.

Read the full profile interview here

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Profile: Gina Soden

13/09/16

Profile: Gina Soden

Published in issue 22 of State magazine

Portfolio: Roxana Halls

14/09/14

Portfolio: Roxana Halls

Growing up, Roxana Halls wanted to be an actor – until she realised she was too shy. Luckily, at 16, she discovered painting. Theatre is still a vital part of her art, however, as her studio is the saloon bar of an old theatre, now bingo hall, in Streatham, and much of her work has theatrical themes. Tingle-Tangle, an exhibition at the National Theatre in 2009, was a celebration of all things cabaret, and recent commissions have been for large-scale canvases telling the stories of Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz.

All of her work has a feminist take and many pieces show teetering towers of precariously stacked objects, a comment on the precarious balancing act women must perform to uphold their facades in every day life. Her recent exhibition, Appetite, at Hay Hill Gallery, was filled with paintings of women eating, set on a sliding scale, with some scarcely daring to indulge and others displaying a voracious appetite. “This has nothing to do with eating disorders and body image,” Hall assures. “The food is a metaphor for life.”

 

Halls’ ideas come from all over and Carvery was inspired by Jack Monroe. Representing many of the foods with which Halls grew up, in her working class, east end family – savaloy, tinned spam, mushy peas and angel delight – it argues that people can make it good, regardless of their income.

With glowing reviews by Brian Sewell, a studio to beat all others, and commissions from the rich and famous, Halls has definitely proved this to be true. Her one wish? “To paint Kate Bush. Now that would be perfect!”

Roxana Halls: Appetite

Hay Hill Gallery

25 August - 26 September 2014

http://roxanahalls.com/home.html 

To see this portfolio in full, please buy the October issue of DIVA magazine

Artist Profile: Aileen Kelly

08/09/14

Artist Profile: Aileen Kelly

Aileen Kelly’s works are processual. Everything is in a state of becoming – or maybe unbecoming. Her found objects – appropriated and adapted, displaced and dismantled, stratified and suspended. One mattress with its covering peeled off, coated in a shabby, careworn felt; another exploded with its springs on show, a jack-in-the-box, a ribcage, somehow exposed, raw and vulnerable, yet strong and offering support – stripped down to discover what is inside: the essence and the essential.

Her Sculpture Drawings are like blueprints: tentative structures made out of fabric-wrapped posts in fragile, midway states. Neither one thing nor the other, they quiver and quaver, resting like a lean-to, reaching like a sapling. Frames or portals, leading from the past to the future, circumventing the present. They carry a sense of the familiar, yet are uncannily dissociated. Memorials to something lost, but to what? Feminine somehow, both in their fabrication and tentative presence, their silence and unimposing stance. They offer mere suggestions, nothing is concrete, but every gesture is made with intent.

Kelly’s Stitch Drawings speak in the same tone. Reincarnating images of trauma, stitched on to cloth or paper, showing tangled threads, fractured lines and obliterated identities. Some are projected up large on to white walls, shadowing down upon us, heavy yet weightless. Incomplete outlines, their souls might seem to drain away into the void. Worked up from specific media images, they could, nonetheless, be any child, any parent, any loved one. ‘Do I have the right?’ Kelly muses, visibly concerned at her trespassing into someone else’s private realm, private grief. But, as a mother, she grieves for the loss of others, memorialising one, memorialising many.

Saving every remnant, Kelly has recently turned to collage and printmaking, recycling scraps and cut offs, once again breathing new life into other people’s waste materials. For her, nothing is without worth. Everything offers a haunting reminder of the transience of existence, a subtle metaphor for the fragility of structures upon which we rely. Everything will have its turn once again in the greater process known as life.

Artist's website: aileenkelly.co.uk 

Images:

All © the artist

Let Down  

2014   

180cm x 105cm  

Upholstered wood in pinstripe fabric, fabric lengths

Watch
2012
150cm x 200cm

Fabric wall drawing with black pinstripe cloth

(i) 

2013   

40cm x 30cm  

Linen, pinstripe fabric, cotton stitch

Portfolio: Sarah Pucill

22/06/14

Portfolio: Sarah Pucill

“I read somewhere the other day that in black and white film, you do still see colours. It is more imaginative. It has ambiguity. The flesh is the same colour as the beach, so things happen.” This is why photographer and filmmaker Sarah Pucill prefers to work in monochrome. Uncertainty of recognition and bending of identity are key themes recurring throughout her works. From her first film, You be Mother (1990), through Stages of Mourning (2004), made in memory of her late partner Sandra Lahire, to her most recent and first feature-length film, Magic Mirror (2013), based around the work of French Surrealist and early queer thinker, Claude Cahun, Pucill has employed motifs such as blood, milk, hair, masks and the mirror, to call into question representations of the female body from Medusa to Venus. At a time when it was popular to portray masculine lesbian identity, Pucill sought instead to celebrate the unison of two feminine female bodies in Swollen Stigma (1998) and Cast (2000) considers the lesbian overtones she sees inherent in encouraging young girls to nurture female dolls. Her works are evocative and uncanny, speaking a language that will resonate for women across time and space.

Magic Mirror is shortly to be released on DVD. Details to follow on Sarah Pucill’s website and through LUX:

http://www.sarahpucill.co.uk

http://luxonline.org.uk

To see this full portfolio, please buy the July 2014 issue of DIVA magazine

Portfolio: Fernanda Liberti

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Artist Profile: Imogen Crew

22/04/14

Artist Profile: Imogen Crew

Coming out again and again, having to answer inane questions about how you have sex – these are just a couple of the issues facing young lesbians and photographer Imogen Crew has had her fill of them.

In her stark but impactful black and white photographs, she portrays a teenage girl, faceless, bare chested, nipples taped over, questions and exclamations scrawled across her front. In some, she appears resigned, humiliated, uncertain maybe. In others, she scrubs frantically to erase the insults.

Taken when she was just 16 years old, as part of a project called Contrasts, these images were of particular personal relevance for the artist, who was, herself, asking these selfsame questions. The images reflect her own coming out.

“I wanted to explore the questions and labels lesbians face in society,” Crew says. “I started by thinking back to questions I had, and I asked friends of mine who had experienced different things while coming out.” The model is a friend who had recently been through the process as well.

The use of thick black tape crisscrossed over the nipples adds to the image in a number of ways. Crew wanted it to show how even though someone is ‘out’, the coming out process recurs daily. Additionally, it desexualises the image so that the message becomes the focus of attention.

Now 18 and studying photography at college in Leicester, Crew works with a Nikon D500 and enjoys “the look of film photographs, the little tricks you can do to transform a negative, and the technique of developing film and then enlarging your images.”

See Imogen Crew’s photographs on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/110589857@N06/

To see this full profile, please pick up a copy of the May 2014 Sex Issue of DIVA magazine