Portfolio: Heather Carol

27/09/16

Portfolio: Heather Carol

Drawing inspiration from current social culture, history, mythology and literature, as well as from her own experiences as a disabled, lesbian artist, Heather Carol’s painstakingly intricate egg tempera paintings explore her personal coming out journey through a myriad of symbolism. For example, taking from Celtic mythology, in Journey of a May Femme (2016), the fox symbolises passion, the beech symbolises knowledge, and the birch symbolises renewal and new beginnings. At first glance, one sees just a woodland scene – animals, foliage and maybe a face – but look closer and, beneath the surface, emblems begin to appear: a double-headed axe, lambda, interlocked Venuses, the international symbol of access (or wheelchair symbol)…

Often taking more than 100 hours to create, Carol’s paintings employ the technique of sgrafitto (scratching into the surface of the gesso panel) to create texture – a method she has adopted to suit her needs. Her medical condition, Myoclonic Dystonia, causes tremors and involuntary movements, leading to paralysis and impaired hands. While looking at her finished work, the effort involved is blatantly apparent, no one would guess this extra challenge that has needed to be overcome.

A poet as well as a painter, Carol allows one artistic medium to feed into the other. In the poem to accompany the painting Carpe Diem (2016), she writes:

Have pride,

whether you are straight, bi, trans, femme or gay.

Carpe diem: seize the day.

This is certainly the motto by which she now seems to live.

http://www.heathercarol.co.uk

Also published at DIVA online

Image:

Heather Carol

Carpe Diem 

2016 

egg tempera on a traditional gesso panel 

52cm x 52cm

Photo: Debbie Humphry

Portfolio: Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings

17/07/16
Portfolio: Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings

See the full portfolio with more images in the August 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine
Alongside the artists' response to the Orlando shootings online here

Portfolio: Henrietta Armstrong

20/05/16
Portfolio: Henrietta Armstrong

As a child, Henrietta Armstrong used to make large robots from odd bits of wood she would hammer together in the garden. In her young mind, these would guard the house. “I don’t have an awareness of ever wanting to be an artist,” she says, looking back. “I just always was one.”

Armstrong describes herself as both “a visual thinker” and “a total clutterbug”. She trawls the internet for source material, collects unusual fabrics and enjoys rummaging around car boot sales and Parisian flea markets. Recently, she has been looking at ways to expand her practice and is taking a crash course in animation from YouTube tutorials.

Armstrong is also working with four other women artists to put on an exhibition, The Overview Effect, this month. “The Overview Effect is the name given to the change in perspective that astronauts have when they view Earth from space and realise how fragile it is in its relation to the universe,” she explains. “I have always really loved the structure of pylons and have been digitally manipulating photos I have taken. I’ve been looking at the idea of future civilisations or aliens looking at these weird structures without knowing what they were for, like they were deities to worship or offerings to our gods. I’m completely obsessed with patterns. Drawing lines and connecting things up, physically and metaphorically, is very satisfying.”

See Henrietta Armstrong’s work in The Overview Effect at Lewisham Art House from 6-19 June 2016.

Image:

Henrietta Armstrong

Pylon 6 (2016)

www.henriettaarmstrong.com

Published in the June 2016 issue of DIVA magazine

Portfolio: Jo Spence. BP Spotlight at Tate Britain

14/12/15
Portfolio: Jo Spence

BP Spotlight: Jo Spence
Tate Britain
until autumn 2016

Published in the January 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine

Portfolio: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

17/11/15

Portfolio: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz: In Memoriam to Identity

Part of Autumn Season: Alien Encounters

Nottingham Contemporary

10 October – 31 December 2015

“By looking at forgotten or disavowed queer moments, affects, acts, or leftovers, we not only want to (re)consider them as political interventions, but also try to re-create the past in order to articulate a contemporary desire,” explain the artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, who have been working together in Berlin since 2007. “Our works often revisit materials from the past – a score, a piece of music, a film, a photograph or a performance – wondering about and excavating unrepresented or illegible moments. We work with performance to create embodiments, which are able to conflate different times, drawing relations between these times” – a process they refer to as “temporal drag”.

The duo’s performances take place very much for the camera, which is often explicitly acknowledged by the performer. There is no attempt to disillusion viewers into believing that the performers have become anyone else – it is much more about their interaction and connection with the historical objects and becoming, as Boudry puts it, a moving photograph.

Boudry and Lorenz’s films are often very fragmentary, with the music abruptly edited, underlining the duo’s artistic direction. The performances raise questions about the meaning of visibility, bodily pathologisation, glamour, resistance and the very nature of performance itself.

Published in the December 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine

Portfolio: Shalini Seereeram

13/09/15
Portfolio: Shalini Seereeram

“I am putting myself out there and challenging silences. I know I am not the same but why must I be quiet?”

Indo-Trinidadian artist Shalini Seereeram (born 1972) has been representing the growing LGBT art and culture community in the Caribbean for the past 15 years and is the first female artist to publicly portray intimacy between women in her country. Her latest series of works, Intimate Moments, focuses entirely on the interplay between women and comprises vibrantly colourful, fluidly sensual paintings, in acrylics, oils and nail varnish, showing women embracing – entangled and entwined – sharing a closeness that requires no words.

“Intimacy to me is not purely physical,” says Seereeram. “It is an emotional dance within ourselves. If I cannot entirely connect with someone on a level of compassion and understanding, it becomes shallow and superficial.”

Seereeram strives to represent that subtle intimacy that only women can truly share. Hailing from a remote part of Trinidad, living amid sugar cane fields, her work has caused something of a stir in her native community. “There can be a certain underlying hesitation and mixed reviews because of innate prejudices in society,” she admits. But Seereeram is not ashamed to bare her intimate moments and hopes that her work will encourage others to accept themselves for who they are. “There is someone out there who is saying they are not seeing images of themselves,” she says. And that is something she is working to change.

Shalini Seereeram’s exhibition, Intimate Moments, was held at Campbells Framing and Art Gallery, South Kensington, this August. Her works are still available for viewing and purchasing at the gallery.

campbellsoflondon.co.uk

shaliniseereeram.com

See the full spread in the October 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine

Image:
Passion's Shelter
2015
acrylic

Portfolio: Agnes Martin

14/08/15

Agnes Martin

Tate Modern

3 June – 11 October 2015

"My paintings have neither objects, nor space, nor time, nor anything – no forms. When you give up the idea of right and wrong, you don’t get anything. What you get is rid of everything, freedom from ideas and responsibility.”

Agnes Martin was born in 1912, to Scottish Presbyterians, on a homestead in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her early years recalled Little House on the Prairie, living in hardship in an enormous and radically empty landscape. She later denied that this – or, indeed, any biographical element – played a part in her artwork. “Inspiration,” she said, “is the beginning, the middle and the end.” This inspiration would come to her like the Immaculate Conception, complete, but the size of a postage stamp. She would then scale this up to her imposing six-foot square canvases – a little larger than her body, representing her reach in the world.

Vehemently as Martin rejected autobiography, her schizophrenia clearly had an impact on her work. Her grid-based drawings and paintings might be read as a way of regulating or mediating the noise, but they are neither symptom nor cure of her illness. She was a sophisticated artist and a rigorous self-editor, who destroyed anything not quite up to the mark.

Martin denied being lesbian. She also denied being feminist. Once she even claimed she was not a woman. Nevertheless, she is known to have had romantic relationships with several other female artists and rumours even suggest a liaison with her first dealer, Betty Parsons.

Having lived for many years in the Mexican desert and painted right up to the very end, Martin died in 2004. The current exhibition at Tate Modern offers a chance to experience first hand the uninhibited freedom she sought to conjure through her work.

Image:

Agnes Martin 
Untitled 1977
Watercolour and graphite on paper 9 x 9” (22.9 x 22.9 cm)
Private collection
Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery
© 2015 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

To see this feature in full, please buy the September 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine