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

Interview with Judy Chicago

12/09/15
Interview: Judy Chicago

Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker
14 September - 31 December 2015

The World Goes Pop
Tate Modern
17 September 2015 - 24 January 2016

In 1968, Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939) chose not to participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center because she didn’t want to show in any group defined as “women”, “Jewish” or “California”. A couple of years later, however, she coined the term “feminist art” and she then went on to become known worldwide for her epic $250,000 installation, The Dinner Party (1979) – a large triangular table, measuring 48ft by 43ft by 36ft (14.6 metres by 13 metres by 11 metres), with 39 place settings, each commemorating a historical or mythical female figure. Throughout her career, Chicago has been an outspoken advocate for female artists and has written, taught and co-founded educational establishments in a bid to put an end to what she terms the “institutional failure in our universities and museums to teach the history of feminist art”.

In 2011, the Pacific Standard Time project at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, brought attention to a lot of Chicago’s early work and reminded people that there is more to her than her iconic place settings. The following year, she had a show at Riflemaker in London, and the year after that, she was included in the Spotlight section – a section for artists whom the curator deems to have been overlooked and deserving of re-evaluation – of Frieze Masters, also in London.

Read the rest of this interview here

Interview with Jesc Bunyard

07/09/15

Interview: Jesc Bunyard

Performance, disruption and the photographic

Jesc Bunyard (born 1991) has been having a busy year. Following her success in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014, with which her work toured from Liverpool to Newlyn, via the ICA, she had a residency at the Collusion Real Time Lab in Cambridge in January 2015, and went on to show her film work at the Whitechapel, before being shortlisted as a finalist in the Digital Graffiti juried art competition at Alys Beach, Florida. She is about to have some of her film works shown at the Wysing Arts Centre annual art and music festival, Space-Time: The Multiverse, on 5 September 2015. Only graduating from Goldsmiths with a BA in Fine Art and Art History two years ago, Bunyard has achieved a lot, fast, but she still only sees herself as an emerging artist. She is about to go back to Goldsmiths and embark upon an MA in Contemporary Art Theory.

Anna McNay had an email conversation with Bunyard about her multidisciplinary approach to combining photography, film, performance and installation, placing her viewer in an immersive and perceptually challenging environment.

Read this interview here.

Reviews of Pablo Bronstein and the Treasures of Chatsworth at Nottingham Contemporary and Reality at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

06/09/15
Pablo Bronstein and the Treasures of Chatsworth
Nottingham Contemporary
4 July - 20 September 2015

and

Reality: Modern and Contemporary British Painting
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
10 July - 29 November 2015

Published in The Mail on Sunday, 06/09/15

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

04/09/15

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World

Tate Britain

24 June – 25 October 2015

Hepworth in Yorkshire

The Hepworth Wakefield

16 May – 6 September 2015

A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-1975

The Hepworth Wakefield

18 April 2015 – April 2016

Much as I love looking at the sculptural work of Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), I also love looking at photographs and film footage of the sculptor herself, both at rest and, even more so, at work. Perhaps this quote, from the mouth of the artist herself in 1961, goes some way towards explaining this predeliction: “I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

This summer sees three shows dedicated to the sculptor: Penelope Curtis’s final offering at Tate Britain and two smaller, but equally rigorous and delightful, exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, home to the Hepworth Family Gift, a collection of 44 of the artist’s surviving working models for her bronze sculptures.

While Tate’s exhibition unsurprisingly largely comprises sculpture, it dedicates one worthy section – Staging Sculpture – to photographs taken by both Hepworth and others, showing her work in the landscape. Many of these, including a series of photo-collages, cutting out photographs of existing sculptures and pasting them on to new backdrops, including a house designed by Richard Neutra in Los Angeles and the interior of flats designed by Alfred and Emil Roth and Marcel Breuer in Zurich, have never been shown before, except for when published in Architectural Review in April 1939. Fired by her ambition to work on a larger scale, Hepworth made these composite images to show how her work might enrich an architectural or natural setting. Photography enabled her to explore such sculptural ideas and only partly came out of economic necessity.

You can read the rest of this essay here

Interview with Anna Dumitriu

03/09/15

Interview: Anna Dumitriu

Anna Dumitriu trained as a painter, gaining a masters in painting from Brighton in 1996. With an interest in bacteria and imagery taken from cell biology, she soon sought out a scientist with whom to collaborate, and learned to handle bacteria – including tuberculosis and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Now with almost 15 years’ experience, she is widely respected within the microbiology sphere as one of the team, despite never undergoing any formal training. Her art projects set out to explore and tell stories, to raise questions and to bring the general public into dialogue with scientists and medical professionals about issues that increasingly affect them, but which are often shrouded in mystery – and myth.

Two of Dumitriu’s works have recently been added to the Eden Project’s new permanent exhibition, Invisible You: The Human Microbiome, Studio International spoke to her about what it is like to work on the crossover of science and art.

Read this interview here

Preview of Frieze Masters Spotlight

01/09/15
Preview of Frieze Masters Spotlight
Frieze Masters
Regent's Park
14-18 October 2015

Published in the autumn 2015 issue of RA Magazine