Category: Exhibition

Exhibition information

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Trophy Heads: Amy

Trophy Heads: Amy
Trophy Heads: Amy
SOLD

It’s the ten years since Amy Winehouse death and what do we know apart from her life sustained the British tabloid industry.

I remember hearing “if my daddy thinks I’m fine” and wondering how long she would be with us. I look forward to hearing what her best friend will say.

“You go back to her
And I go back to black”

She is saying black. I wanted the focus on her voice, her lips.

Ars

‘Trophy Heads’ is a series of processed drawings set in wax. The drawings are based on an image significant to the Head and then worked up in graphite and charcoal on Chinese rice paper. Drawings were soaked in wax to create a skin. These drawings were layered on top of each other and then photocopied and soaked in wax. This process was repeated several times with a final dip into wax. The monoprints were framed in black and displayed on the wall.

Wax is a component of lipsticks and charcoal used as eye liner by the Egyptians. Layer up graphite and rice paper links to ancient practices of art.

The images could be something they said to a loaded image that piqued my interest.

The lines of Trophy Heads map to Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol and his preoccupation with celebrity beauty and consumption and mapping them to religious icons. Another boundary crossed was appropriation and copyright where Warhol was sued not by Marilyn or her estate but by the owner of “Niagara” film stills.

I realise my work is complicit in trapping these people in a moment.

Trophy Heads

We place people on pedestals and on spikes.

“Trophy Heads” is a series of works that takes its leave from the human preoccupation with taking and displaying others to serve a purpose: the Shuar blocking a vengeful spirit by severing their enemies’ heads and shrinking them, Khaled al-Asaad’s murder by ISIS to many a head put on a spike.

I dug into my preoccupations to explore the nature of celebrity and how we need to make them Trophy Heads or to put a line around it.

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
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Trophy Heads: Joy

Trophy Head: Joy
Trophy Head: Joy
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Joy Hester is an artist known for her emotional ink paintings and drawings and she was “avant-garde in the most literal sense of the term: experimental, unorthodox and original”, Lesley Harding.

I remapped Joy out of Self-portrait with Joy Hester, by Albert Tucker, 1939 when I found this image was in the same space as House of Ideas: Modern Women, which reminded of the time when an Important Artist and teacher described her Albert Tucker’s wife before artist.

Ars

‘Trophy Heads’ is a series of processed drawings set in wax. The drawings are based on an image significant to the Head and then worked up in graphite and charcoal on Chinese rice paper. Drawings were soaked in wax to create a skin. These drawings were layered on top of each other and then photocopied and soaked in wax. This process was repeated several times with a final dip into wax. The monoprints were framed in black and displayed on the wall.

Wax is a component of lipsticks and charcoal used as eye liner by the Egyptians. Layer up graphite and rice paper links to ancient practices of art.

The images could be something they said to a loaded image that piqued my interest.

The lines of Trophy Heads map to Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol and his preoccupation with celebrity beauty and consumption and mapping them to religious icons. Another boundary crossed was appropriation and copyright where Warhol was sued not by Marilyn or her estate but by the owner of “Niagara” film stills.

I realise my work is complicit in trapping these people in a moment.

Trophy Heads

We place people on pedestals and on spikes.

“Trophy Heads” is a series of works that takes its leave from the human preoccupation with taking and displaying others to serve a purpose: the Shuar blocking a vengeful spirit by severing their enemies’ heads and shrinking them, Khaled al-Asaad’s murder by ISIS to many a head put on a spike.

I dug into my preoccupations to explore the nature of celebrity and how we need to make them Trophy Heads or to put a line around it.

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 Fiona’s 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
Posted on

Trophy Heads: Joan

Trophy Heads: Joan
Trophy Heads: Joan
SOLD

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down you house, you can never tell.

Joan Crawford

Here she is saying “alone” in response to how she likes her coffee; it’s from the Female on the Beach script.

Joan and her stardom certainly ended up on a pyke as it did for Christina.

Ars

‘Trophy Heads’ is a series of processed drawings set in wax. The drawings are based on an image significant to the Head and then worked up in graphite and charcoal on Chinese rice paper. Drawings were soaked in wax to create a skin. These drawings were layered on top of each other and then photocopied and soaked in wax. This process was repeated several times with a final dip into wax. The monoprints were framed in black and displayed on the wall.

Wax is a component of lipsticks and charcoal used as eye liner by the Egyptians. Layer up graphite and rice paper links to ancient practices of art.

The images could be something they said to a loaded image that piqued my interest.

The lines of Trophy Heads map to Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol and his preoccupation with celebrity beauty and consumption and mapping them to religious icons. Another boundary crossed was appropriation and copyright where Warhol was sued not by Marilyn or her estate but by the owner of “Niagara” film stills.

I realise my work is complicit in trapping these people in a moment.

Trophy Heads

We place people on pedestals and on spikes.

“Trophy Heads” is a series of works that takes its leave from the human preoccupation with taking and displaying others to serve a purpose: the Shuar blocking a vengeful spirit by severing their enemies’ heads and shrinking them, Khaled al-Asaad’s murder by ISIS to many a head put on a spike.

I dug into my preoccupations to explore the nature of celebrity and how we need to make them Trophy Heads or to put a line around it.

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
Posted on

Trophy Heads: Marianne

Trophy Heads: Marianne
Trophy Heads: Marianne
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Marianne Faithfull came to mind where I heard that she was ill with COVID. Then I went to know what to know; her music and mythologies, and how her work is enveloped by them; though I am pleased to see she uses these stories and songs as her legacies and money. Then her time in Australia and the press photos and articles around her time in 1969 is telling and creepy. These are for another time.

A few years later, in 1973, Marianne became one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s polaroids. Again, someone with so much to say; her sitting in silence, fully engaged as the role of sitter photographed by someone who could empathise is intriguing.

Ars

‘Trophy Heads’ is a series of processed drawings set in wax. The drawings are based on an image significant to the Head and then worked up in graphite and charcoal on Chinese rice paper. Drawings were soaked in wax to create a skin. These drawings were layered on top of each other and then photocopied and soaked in wax. This process was repeated several times with a final dip into wax. The monoprints were framed in black and displayed on the wall.

Wax is a component of lipsticks and charcoal used as eye liner by the Egyptians. Layer up graphite and rice paper links to ancient practices of art.

The images could be something they said to a loaded image that piqued my interest.

The lines of Trophy Heads map to Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol and his preoccupation with celebrity beauty and consumption and mapping them to religious icons. Another boundary crossed was appropriation and copyright where Warhol was sued not by Marilyn or her estate but by the owner of “Niagara” film stills.

I realise my work is complicit in trapping these people in a moment.

Trophy Heads

We place people on pedestals and on spikes.

“Trophy Heads” is a series of works that takes its leave from the human preoccupation with taking and displaying others to serve a purpose: the Shuar blocking a vengeful spirit by severing their enemies’ heads and shrinking them, Khaled al-Asaad’s murder by ISIS to many a head put on a spike.

I dug into my preoccupations to explore the nature of celebrity and how we need to make them Trophy Heads or to put a line around it.

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

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Trophy Heads: Pyjama Girl

Trophy Heads: Pyjama Girl
Trophy Heads: Pyjama Girl
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Pyjama Girl could be the ultimate Trophy Head. A young woman was murdered, and for the last eighty years, she has been labelled by what she was wearing: her Chinese yellow silk pyjamas.

The Pyjama Girl case starts outside of Albury in 1934 where a young woman is bashed, shot, dumped with a bag on her head and then set on fire. She remained unidentified. She was stored in a bath. Her already damaged face was distorted again with artist impressions and published including in the new technology: the colour magazine. Mum told me stories about reading these magazine articles avidly at the time.

The Pyjama Girl became Linda Agostini and her husband was tried and later deported. There is uncertainty about the identification and the conviction.

The lines and borders of this case wrapped around the community linking across the country using the mechanism of Press. Over time our need to map her to our values made her as big as Phar Lap and Ned Kelly, and like them, a subject of an awkward movie.

Respect to Linda Agostini, Anna Philomena Morgan and the Pyjama Girl

Ars

‘Trophy Heads’ is a series of processed drawings set in wax. The drawings are based on an image significant to the Head and then worked up in graphite and charcoal on Chinese rice paper. Drawings were soaked in wax to create a skin. These drawings were layered on top of each other and then photocopied and soaked in wax. This process was repeated several times with a final dip into wax. The monoprints were framed in black and displayed on the wall.

Wax is a component of lipsticks and charcoal used as eye liner by the Egyptians. Layer up graphite and rice paper links to ancient practices of art.

The images were taken from Social Fabric my response to making a mask during 2020 lockdown. The spilt faces were already manipulated by the police artists in the 1930s and then by me with the PerfectMe app.

The lines of Trophy Heads map to Marilyn Diptych (1962) by Andy Warhol and his preoccupation with celebrity beauty and consumption and mapping them to religious icons. Another boundary crossed was appropriation and copyright where Warhol was sued not by Marilyn or her estate but by the owner of “Niagara” film stills.

I realise my work is complicit in trapping these people in a moment.

Trophy Heads

We place people on pedestals and on spikes.

“Trophy Heads” is a series of works that takes its leave from the human preoccupation with taking and displaying others to serve a purpose: the Shuar blocking a vengeful spirit by severing their enemies’ heads and shrinking them, Khaled al-Asaad’s murder by ISIS to many a head put on a spike.

I dug into my preoccupations to explore the nature of celebrity and how we need to make them Trophy Heads or to put a line around it.

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
Posted on

Pretty flay for a white guy

Pretty flay for a white guy
Pretty flay for a white guy
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Pretty flay for a white guy?
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Pretty flay for a white guy, 2020

Digital documentation of a waxed watercolour and graphite drawing strung up with gold thread.

Liminal, death and what remains. I explored beauty, skin and the gaze using western approaches to medicine and burial to examine the concepts of liminal or transitional space. At death, we are farewelled with a ceremony and then buried or cremated with some of us ending up in jars or on display like an écorché or in MRI slices as examples.

Even though the ancient Greeks had a crack at human dissection and saints were dismembered and stored in reliquaries, it took the eighteenth century to pop body parts in jars. And then we have Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus in Florence. She is a life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing a foetus curled in her womb at the end. Her purpose was to teach anatomy at a time when bodies rotted quickly and possibly had a dodgy provenance. All the while she is wearing pearls and an ecstatic look on her face. Whatever the intent, we have another way a woman can be carved and displayed.

I’m doing my best not to segue to the victims of Jack the Ripper and the traditions of écorché. Instead, I bounce to the Shroud of Turin, the alleged face of Jesus on a rag. This object gains meaning by many of us looking and hoping we are seeing the face of Jesus.
As I built the artwork, other uses for wax and Ed Gein’s preoccupations came to mind as well as the dismemberment of bodies performed by the likes of advertising.

All you can do is fix your gaze.

Development

What you see is the digital documentation and exploration of body in its liminal state. Pretty flay for a white guy is a Spanish Anatomical Venus with her breast and pregnant belly is redrawn in graphite on Chinese rice paper. The drawing is rendered liminal again when it is soaked in wax. The drawing is no longer held in opaque paper. (The wax is a nod to Madame Tussaud and the tradition of wax death masks making the wax work a relic or trophy of skin.) Two versions are drawn and soaked in wax.

First version is surrounded by flourishes. The second version was annotated with advertising slogans from vintage Cleos e.g., “Intimate odour. When your body isn’t discrete … you should be”-Femfresh. Gold watercolour surrounds the work like a halo and her lips, tits, vulva sparkle like the Pigface song “Hips, Tits, Lips, Power”. A layer of misogyny is added when gold threads are sown in to enable the artwork to be strung up like meat. Both works were photographed on white and black velvet backgrounds.

The title “Pretty flay for a white guy” is a play on the Offspring song Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).


Respect to victims of violence referenced directly or indirectly in this work and its development.

References

Barnett, R., (2014) The Sick Rose or Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration, Thames & Hudson LTD, London
Ebenstein, J., (2016) The Anatomical Venus, Thames & Hudson LTD, London
Hartnell, J., (2018) Medieval Bodies: Life. Death and Art in the Middle Ages, Wellcome Collection, London
Why these anatomical models are not disgusting By Fiona Macdonald 26th May 2016 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160526-why-these-anatomical-models-are-not-disgusting
The Romantic, Macabre History of the Anatomical Venus Ian Shank Jan 29, 2018 2:35pm https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-romantic-macabre-history-anatomical-venus
https://www.ladyscience.com/podcast/history-anatomical-venus-wax-anatomy

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Who’s there (after Narcissus)

Who's there (after Narcissus)
Who’s there (after Narcissus)
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Who’s there (after Narcissus), 2020

Encaustic wax collage on board (30.4cm by 22.5cm).

Narcissus is gazing at his reflection in the pool, and unbeknownst to him, he is close to finding out his future. Through the wax pool, you can see the yellow Narcissus flower; the bloom of youth becomes blooms.

The body silhouettes were drawn by Suzanne Buchanan.

Narcissus flowers watercolours painted by me.

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Asystole

Asystole
Asystole
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Asystole, 2020

Encaustic wax collage 20cm x 20cm board.

An asystole happens when the heart’s electrical power stops.
Muscle and blood cease and coagulate.
Leaning on the traditions of medical representation, wax becomes body.

References
Ginn, Sheryl R., and Lorenzo Lorusso. “Brain, Mind, and Body: Interactions with Art in Renaissance Italy.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 17, no. 3 (July 16, 2008): 295–313. doi:10.1080/09647040701575900.

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