Plumping Cochineal is a lipstick advertisement broken into its primal elements. The lipstick appears here as wax and cochineal shell. The black is the lipstick case. The text is the carved lines. An advertisement wouldn’t be complete without the perfect pout modelled by Linda Marie!
My exploration of lips and makeup started in 2019. As the works came into being, I created a naming convention using a beauty business name generator to create titles that places the works as bluntly as commercial products.
Vermillion Borders
Flesh, rock, lip, sea.
Vermillion Borders maps our emotional cartography. A vermillion border is the line around your lips separating skin and lip. What is outside of the line? What is contained inside the border?
Linda explores our relationship with the land through surreal landscapes, where my arts practice is based on ways of communication and complexity in life. Their practices use ink, watercolour and graphite on paper (both), digital and encaustic (Fiona), and oils and text (Linda). Vermillion Borders is a series of mixed media works unified by a limited colour palette of red, black and white and careful curation. The works were generated by one artist producing a starting point and sending it to the other to complete: creating a true integration of both artist’s practice. The stages were completed in isolation so that each cannot influence the other’s response to the original.
The works were mapped to gallery space at Alternating Current Art Space to fit into the walls, ceiling beams and the energy flow to and from other shows.
“A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going — in a sense it’s three tenses in one.”
Peter Greenaway