This year within my art practice I am developing ideas around the concept of the ‘perfect’ being, concentrating heavily on the importance of aesthetics and the body, but also delving in to the taboo science of eugenics. Projecting the idea that we can pick and chose the new generation, adapting our children's genes to suit our own personal vision of the ‘perfect being’. Life drawing has provided me with a simple guidance toward and focus on a real figure, the natural body, unedited and nude. The end charcoal drawings reflect the models attitude; natural, unedited, as well as standing out as raw and honest which I like. Artists Jenny Saville and Stanley Spencer again fuel my interest in real bodies and figures, un-idealaised. Jenny Savilles paintings also playing with the distortion and adaptation of the bodies, as I did in my performance piece ‘Pressure’ last year. 

 

Also I am working with a group at the moment, to produce an exhibition to run along side Manchester Fashion Week and aim to include a similar performance piece in the shop window, using more nude models and incorporating key items of Manchester’s fashion over the years. Using magazine images and edited models photo shots, I create collages of their bodies mismatched together, changed and distorted beauty. Their lack of hair and clothes, and in some cases their faces, strips them of their personality and portrays them as only a body, a figure of what we want to be. I have also included capes in some of them creating the look of a comic book character, (a super human, someone to look up to and idealize). The sexualisation of women is a key concept in these collages as well as my small women drawings with lipstick prints for heads or lips (again) out of magazines. In the collages I have created the women without arms or with their arms splayed upwards away from their bodies to recreate Josef Thorak’s idea in his piece ‘The Judgement of Paris’, 1937, to “ensure there is no obstruction to beholding their nicely rounded breasts and inverted nipples”.

 

Also I love the work of Vanessa Beecroft and her displays of ‘perfection’, the women in Beecroft’s performances and the goddesses in Thorack’s sculpture share the same representation of women’s beauty, “long legs, narrow pelvises, flat abdomens and rounded breasts” (Brauer 2008: 200), as well as Beecroft’s models shaved skin resembling the smooth marble used for Thorak’s sculptures. The similarities in pieces suggest there has been little change in our idea of ‘the perfect body’ over the years, however perhaps more development in achieving it, as Thorak’s image of goddesses; women beyond reach and more perfect than any woman on earth, are stood in Beecroft’s performance as the real women of today.. perfection achieved? That is the question my art practice challenges, ‘have we achieved perfection?’.

 

Contact:

Email - phoebe.wade17@rocketmail.com

Phone - 07960872976